The Supreme Court (SC) has asked the Election Commission the reason for disenfranchisement of the security personnel and civil servants deployed for the election.
A single bench of Justice Ananda Mohan Bhattarai hearing the writ filed
on Tuesday by Bharat Mainali, a staffer at the Office of the Attorney General, to get an order to prevent disenfranchisement of those deployed for the election has asked so. The Apex Court has also summoned both the sides to the court
on Sunday.
The government staffers and security persons deployed for election will not get to vote this time. They were allowed to vote in the Proportional Representation (PR) electoral system in both the Constituent Assembly (CA) elections.
Almost 500,000 security persons and civil servants will be disenfranchised in lack of the provision in the upcoming election. Mainali has argued that such disenfranchisement would tantamount to rendering the government staffers stateless.
The law requires the EC to maintain temporary voter list including the civil servants, security personnel, convicts, elderly kept at the government's old-age homes, and government staffers deployed for the election. But the EC has not maintained such list this time.
There are a total of 15,427,731 voters in Nepal as per the latest electoral rolls published by the EC.
