Expatriate voters showed little interest in casting their ballots in the recent elections, with only four votes received from abroad in the Bogura-6 by-election and Sherpur-3 polls.
Of these, three expatriates voted in Bogura-6 and one in Sherpur-3, both held on 9 April—two months after the 13th general election.
“The returning officer of Bogura-6 received three ballots from expatriates, while the Sherpur-3 returning officer received one,” said Brigadier General Saleem Ahmad Khan, team lead of the Election Commission’s Out of Country Voting (OCV) System Development and Implementation initiative, on Sunday.
In addition, 1,065 domestic voters cast ballots in Bogura-6 and 2,018 in Sherpur-3 under the In-Country Postal Voting (ICPV) system.
A total of 7,309 voters—5,645 in-country and 1,664 expatriates—had registered to vote by postal ballot in the two constituencies. Postal voting began on 30 March and ended at 4:30pm on 9 April.
The current Election Commission, led by Chief Election Commissioner AMM Nasir Uddin, introduced an IT-supported hybrid postal voting system combining online registration with manual ballot papers in the 13th general election held on 12 February.
A total of 1,528,131 voters—including 767,233 expatriates and 760,898 government officials, election personnel, Ansar and VDP members, and prisoners—registered under the OCV and ICPV programmes for the national election.
Of them, returning officers received 1,165,593 completed postal ballots—498,205 from abroad and 667,388 from within the country—across 299 of the 300 constituencies.
