East Provincial Council Elections: Incident Free

People's Action for Free and Fair Elections (PAFFREL), releasing its first supplementary report on the Eastern PC poll yesterday called it largely incident free while noting that violence might raise its head due to heightened competition after the new year break.

According to PAFFREL they had received 18 cases so far with all of them being recorded after the Sinhala and Tamil New Year. PAFFREL Chairman Kingsley Rodrigo said yesterday even though there were 18 complaints, only two could be categorized as serious.

He also noted that while parties like UNP abstained from contesting the Batti poll citing the TMVP factor, this time round they had decided to join the race with the same party in the fray.

Meanwhile, PAFFREL has decided to deploy over 2500 monitors for the forthcoming poll which would include a team of international observers numbering over 20.

They are also to deploy local stationary monitors on Election Day for 1022 polling centres by including two monitors to man each station in addition to mobile groups.