KATHMANDU, DECEMBER 28

The Election Commission has commenced a review of the recent elections to the House of Representatives and provincial assemblies to be clarified by the law.

A two-day preliminary review programme kicked off in Nagarkot of Bhaktapur as part of preparation from the province and district-level review campaign.

Inaugurating the event, Chief Election Commissioner Dinesh Kumar Thapaliya stressed the need to analyse the strength and shortcomings of the election and draft the required post-election legal and policy level reforms, among other affairs.

'Time demands that we assess the extent to which we can implement conclusions of the post-election review programmes of the past and to set a ground for making future elections more systematic and effective,' he said. 'In view of the election cycle, we are now also at the pre-election period as five years are awaited for the arrival of the next periodic election. We feel work pressure and find ourselves in hustle and bustle after each election is announced. We can manage the work pressure by reducing our work load in the pre-election time,' he suggested.

According to him, though the EC has tried to establish a system by clarifying confusions over the announcement of election date, terms of people's representatives, and electoral phases as such matters ought to be clarified by a law.

The matters of the post-election review period include sorting out whether a person holding the responsibility of one political party is allowed to be recommended as a proportional representative candidate by another party, and paving the way toward enforcing the issues of gender and inclusion in the election in accordance with the spirit of the constitution and legally settling disputes with regard to the candidate's qualification.

EC Under-secretary Kamal Bhattarai, EC secretary and chiefs of divisions and sections were present on the occasion.

A version of this article appears in the print on December 29, 2022, of The Himalayan Times.