Motivation:
At a press conference in August 2015, the Commissioner of Elections noted the responsibility of all to ensure the integrity of elections and invited contributions. The website of the Department of Elections shall not undertake statistics on the results of elections. This was after Dr. Laksiri Fernando (Colombo Telegraph) and I had raised questions. The response it seemed was indirect.
As there is a need for independent and fair minded analysis and a repository of such information in the longer-term than the coming elections, we have launched a website, twitter account (@slelect), a Facebook page and mail subscription form. All of this was started in July 2015.
SLElect in the Press
Our feature articles have appeared in the Financial Times, Ceylon Daily News, Colombo Telegraph) as to why there was an excess of a million electors in the voting list compared to the age-eligible population. The article was carried in Sinhala (Colombo Telegraph) after translation by N. Karunadasa and Tamil (Vidiyal) after translation by N. Asokan. Hilmy Ahamed (Colombo Telegraph) and Dr. A.C. Visvalingam the President of the Citizens Movement of Good Governance (Island) queried the lack of response to this article. We have followed up looking on a 5 fold rise in the postal vote over the last 3 decades as the population increase by 1/3 (Financial Times, Sri Lanka Guardian, Colombo Telegraph).
Team:
The work here is undertaken by a multi-disciplinary collective of geographically volunteers. It is supported by a skilled panel of advisors. Our volunteers and advisors are skilled in data management, statistical analysis, spatial and time series analysis, geographic visualization and IT based delivery mechanisms. We are keen to have inputs from translators, journalists, programmers, video editors, and social media monitoring experts.
Values:
We shall remain non-partisan and rigorous in undertaking our analysis; and hope that similarly minded folks can contribute. While contributing insights to question of public importance, we anticipate this work to be educational and motivational for students and others. We hope to cover other areas that are in the public interest. We shall sustain the work after the elections on a lower key.
Who Owns Us:
This is a genuine citizen effort – we are free of all constraints. For the record, we are not funded by anyone! The cost for doing this is really the time and skills of the volunteers – most of whom have little liking for our politicians or political parties. But we think that some sunlight can help in hidden but consequential nooks of the process.
On behalf of the SLElect team,
ZL Mohamed, Coordinator and Curator
