Colombo - the carnival ground of electoral fraud

ELECTION: The election of members to the Colombo Municipal Council, where the UNP claims victory through the Spectacle Group, makes it clear the UNP had no interest whatever in Colombo and the problems facing its citizens, in the undisguised political cheating it carried out to retain control over the city.

A political party, which could not fill a set of nomination papers, was determined to enter through the backdoor, to control Colombo, in the same corrupt manner it had done for fifty years.

The Cooray method used the list of the Spectacle Group as its proxies, not realizing the legal obstacles that lie ahead in that method of backdoor entry. Consequently, Colombo will have no proper administration until all the legal issues raised by the UNP's crooked politics are resolved.

Sirisena Cooray, to whom the CMC poll was another carnival, claimed the spectacles were in his pocket, after the results were announced. A new Sunday newspaper let us into the truth that Carnival Cooray could not even vote at last Saturday's elections, because his name was not on the electoral register.

"The Nation on Sunday" quoted him saying his name had been deleted from the voters register while away in Australia, on retirement. Which means, even if the UNP had in fact contested Colombo under its elephant symbol and won, Sirisena Cooray could not have entered the Council, far from being Mayor of Colombo, as he was not an elector at last Saturday's poll.

Having carried out the dirty work of putting up posters of so-called UNP candidates, with preferential numbers and the "specs" as the UNP symbol, the UNP fooled its own voters into believing that voting for the "specs" would ensure continued UNP to control the CMC.

A large number of middle class voters who did not like this contemptible dishonesty of the UNP, stayed away from voting, accounting for the very low poll recorded.

However, there were many, even among the educated, that believed voting for the "specs" would mean a "shoo in" for UNP led by Sirisena Cooray.

The blind monitors

After the polls, two local organizations of elections monitors, who are well funded from abroad and boasted how many monitors and vehicles they had on the field to monitor the local polls on last Saturday, issued statements that by and large the polls were fair, except for a few incidents. This report of a "free and fair" poll covered Colombo too.

Surprisingly these monitoring organizations did not see the outright fraud taking place, where voters were misled into robbing their votes for a group of proxy candidates for the UNP.

This took place at Gampaha too, where the UPFA sought election through the Liberal Party list, but the campaigning there did not have all the elements of open cheating by the UNP in cahoots with the "Specs" in Colombo.

Unless they were blind to the fact, if these monitors were indeed genuine, they should have issued statements from the beginning of the UNP's proxy campaign, of how it was misleading Colombo voters, and carrying out what can only be seen as a massive electoral fraud.

Apparently, these monitors only see violence and the stuffing of ballot boxes as electoral fraud. Well, the fraud was there to see right before their eyes in Colombo, on every wall where UNP posters displayed the photos and numbers of their so-called "candidates" who were not in the fray, with the "specs" as their symbol, which was not so.

And stuffing of ballot boxes did take place with the vote that went to the 'specs". When the confusion was so great, the Commissioner General of Elections intervened to put the record straight, by stating very clearly, that no person who did not stand for election and get any votes from a particular party or group, could be named to replace those of a party or group that was elected who later chose to resign.

The UNP's initial response to this was to accuse the Polls Chief of being a party to a conspiracy against it.

Later, possibly when the truth dawned on them or the fraud was seen to be exposed, the UNP's Deputy Leader Karu Jayasuriya (gentleman politician???), said they supported the Spectacle group to manipulate the CMC administration from outside, through the "specs" members inside the Council.

One does not expect the Deputy Leader of the UNP, which claims to stand for democratic values, to make such statements about the politics of puppetry or the remote control.

The icing on the cake of electoral fraud came when the UNP's leader Ranil Wickremesinghe, returning from abroad after a refresher course in democratic politics, announced the symbol of the UNP was the "specs".

Such folly in leadership is not strange to him. In the event the UNP that did not run, cannot gain control of the CMC.

Karu Jayasuriya now wants another election held for Colombo, where the UNP will make sure its nomination is properly filled to get back to the seats of corruption in the CMC.

He has thus revealed that what the UNP was doing all along was not to accept its errors in nominations and let the voters of Colombo choose from the lists of genuine contenders in the fray, but to manouevre for another election in Colombo.

This is not the time to give in to the UNP's corrupt fancies. It's time for the Government to step in to clean Colombo of garbage and corruption, clean out its tenement gardens that breed crime and spread disease, and do all that is needed to make Colombo a city that one can be proud to live in, and then consult voters for their verdict on the record of performance.

Colombo cannot again be made the carnival grounds of corruption of Sirisena Cooray and the UNP.