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Cost of electing one MP rises to Rs. 77 million – CMEV
Text and pic by Priyan De Silva
The National Coordinator of the Centre for Monitoring Election Violence (CMEV) Manjula Gajanayake said, yesterday, that the cost of electing a single MP amounted to approximately Rs 77 million.
Gajanayake said that while the government spent Rs 85 billion on the election, the estimated campaign expenditure incurred by political parties and contestants was over Rs. 1.59 billion. “The cost incurred by the government per voter in 2004 was only Rs. 67 and it has escalated to Rs. 523 per voter today,” he added.
Gajanayake said that a parliamentary election was the biggest logistic operation in a democratic country and added that nearly 16 million eligible voters were expected to cast their votes at 12,885 polling centres today.
Gajanayake claimed that observations and reports by election monitors had helped playing a role to empower Election Commission to annul the votes at any polling centre if major violations took place there. He said that 10,000 election monitors had been assigned for today’s election.
