Feb 11, Colombo: Election Commission of Sri Lanka says there is a practical problem of issuing results of the 2018 Local Authority and the release of results will be delayed considerably.
Issuing a statement the Chairman of Elections Mahinda Deshapriya said counting has been completed and the Returning Officers have received the results by phone and fax.
However the Returning Officers have to verify the results again and therefore, results cannot be released to media until the Returning Officers enter the necessary data.
The Commission said despite the postal votes being included in the overall count of Local Government bodies, in several bodies the postal votes have not been handed over to the Returning Officer for the final tally. Therefore the Returning Officers have been vested with the responsibility of verifying the results once again.
The Election Commission posted a message apologizing to the public for the inconvenience. It said:
"This system was developed to update the map and relevant data automatically according to the results come from local polling stations. But election commission received the data for entire ward through a scan document in hard copy format which cannot be feed to the system.
Therefore, please kindly note that the system will not update the information automatically.
We apologize for the inconvenience."