Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka Elections and Disability

The election law and practices in Sri Lanka provide few accommodations for voters with disabilities.

Recently, IFES’s Senior Advisor for Human Rights, Jerry Mindes, traveled to Sri Lanka and was able to observe the participation of people with disabilities during the April 2, 2004 parliamentary elections.

Typically, Election Day voting takes place at schools and temples. Often, these are some distance from the road, perhaps 100 meters or more. For security reasons, vehicles are generally not allowed to approach the polling center, but must stay by the side of the road.

The Election law acknowledges that voters with physical disabilities might have difficulty walking the distance from home to the polling station, or from the road to the polling station. To address this concern, the law provides an opportunity for voters to apply in advance for permission to travel by car or other vehicle to the polling station itself. To make the public aware of this provision in law, the Election Department of Sri Lanka places an advertisement in the newspaper in advance of Election Day that explains the applicable provision of law (above), and provides an application form that must be completed in advance by the voter.

In practice, however, this observer noticed several times that elderly and disabled voters who arrived at the polling place by vehicle were allowed entry onto the school or temple grounds without having to display any authorization from the Election Department.

Like most election laws, the Sri Lankan law does not provide blind voters with an opportunity to vote in secret. Instead, the presiding officer shall, ”in the presence of another member of his polling staff, mark the ballot paper of such voter in the manner directed by the voter.” The photograph (at right) illustrates how this worked in the Gampaha district outside of Columbo. From discussions with blind voters in many different nations, IFES has learned that this method does not provide the voter with the confidence that the intent of his or her vote will be honored. To address the issue of voter confidence, many jurisdictions allow the voter to choose their own assistant. In a few jurisdictions (El Salvador, Ghana, and Sierra Leone, for example) voters who are blind have access to a Braille and/or tactile ballot guide, enabling them to vote independently and in secret. Examples of these ballot guides are available at the following: http://www.electionaccess.org/Bp/Ballot_Templates.htm