July 17, Colombo: Election Commissioner of Sri Lanka, Dayananda Dissanayake today expressed the problems he had to face due to the practice of having random elections.

Speaking at a press briefing at the Election Secretariat Office he revealed that he has only 525 employees in the Department and therefore faces a shortage of manpower to conduct the elections.

“Right now we are facing a shortage of 32 employees. We have no authority to fill the vacancies, neither do they take steps to fill them,” he lamented.

The Commissioner also, highlighted the need of conducting elections according to an agenda or to a set calendar. He said, such measure would be easy for his Department as well as to the public.

Further, he pointed out the urgent need to change the present voting system. He said the preferential voting system has caused a lot of unhealthy results and therefore suggested a mixed system instead of the present one. According to him current system does not allow the true representative of the people in a respective area to be selected.