Election Commissioner (EC) Abul Fazal Mohammad Sanaullah has said that the EC is working on ways to implement postal ballots as the method by which expat Bangladeshis will be casting their votes, though there are challenges regarding ensuring voter privacy in implementation.
Abul Fazal Mohammad Sanaullah said there are two major challenges with postal ballots: One is ensuring the privacy of the vote, and the other is the risk of votes received from abroad being invalidated if the candidate list changes due to a court order. Additionally, the global failure rate for ballots reaching their destination by mail is about 24%.
Presenting global experiences, he said, according to international standards, the registration rate for postal ballots is only 2.7%. Furthermore, the vote collection rate within this is below 30%.
However, expatriate Bangladeshis are more interested in voting compared to others. Citing the experiences of various countries, including India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Malaysia, he said to keep expectations limited, but remains hopeful that they will not fail in this endeavour.
Regarding registration, Abul Fazal Mohammad Sanaullah said the work will be done in two phases. First, voter registration – those who already have NID cards are included in the voter list.
Then, a separate registration for Out-of-Country Voting will be required. An app called ‘Postal Vote BD’ is being developed for this purpose and will be launched in the third week of November. A period of 7-10 days will be given for registration in each region, with an additional 3-7 days kept if necessary.
He said, in this election, the opportunity to implement expatriate voting has been created for the first time, announced by Chief Adviser Muhammad Yunus in a three-point speech on 16 December, 2024. The chief adviser had said that he wants to ensure the voting rights of expatriates.
Since then, the Election Commission has been with the Expatriate Board. After collecting the experiences of various countries worldwide, information from research institutions, and opinions-data received from 44 mission offices, the commission discussed various methods.
Research institutions including Dhaka University, BUET, MISP, and political parties were involved in the discussions. The commissioner informed that the Election System Reform Commission had also submitted two proposals regarding expatriate voting: IT-supported postal ballot and online voting.
Sanaullah said, among the six common methods of expatriate voting used worldwide, the most used are in-person voting and postal ballots. Online voting is still implemented to a limited extent, with only two countries having fully implemented online voting.
Proxy voting, mobile postal ballots, and fax voting are also used in some countries. Initially, postal ballot, proxy voting, and online Voting had been proposed, however, online voting remains unfeasible for now. Proxy voting had little support from political parties, leading to its eventual dismissal.
Sanaullah said that this time, Bangladeshi expats will vote through postal ballots. Expatriates will not have to pay any charges for voting in this election, although the government’s cost per vote will be about Tk700.
