KATHMANDU, MARCH 11
The Election Commission held a meeting with parties and informed them about its decision to put a Rs 7.5-lakh ceiling on poll expenditure for a candidate vying for the post of mayor or deputy mayor of a metropolitan city. Local polls will be held in a single phase on May 13.
The poll panel also put a Rs 5.5- lakh expenditure ceiling for those vying for posts of mayor and deputy mayor of sub-metropolitan cities.
Those contesting the posts of chiefs and deputy chiefs of municipalities and rural municipalities should limit their poll expenditure at Rs 450,000 and Rs 350,000, respectively, said the EC.
Representative of the Democratic Socialist Party-Nepal Keshav Jha said he proposed that the EC should put a Rs 50-million cap on those contesting mayoral posts in metropolitan cities keeping in mind the ground reality.
"Everybody knows that polls are expensive.
Unless laws and policies are realistic, parties and candidates will conceal their actual expenditure,"
Jha said. He said the EC tried to assure representatives that it would act against candidates if they submitted fake reports. "But how can we be sure about the EC action? It has not acted against one candidate who has not submitted actual poll expenditure details," Jha said. He said parties' representatives agreed that the electoral system was faulty.
"To keep poll expenses in check, the country needs to go for fully proportional electoral system," he said.
Asked if the EC would revise its decision on poll expenditure caps, EC Spokesperson Shaligram Sharma Paudel said he did not know if the EC would revise its decision, but the decision would remain valid unless the EC changed it.
Paudel said voters who would reach franchise age - 18 - on May 12, would be eligible to vote in local elections. This cut-of-date is expected to enable 200,000 additional voters to cast their votes.
The EC told parties' representatives that it could grant party-wise election symbol to only six national parties, but fringe parties opposed the EC proposal. Some new parties said if they were deprived of an election symbol for their candidates, that would be unfair.
They also opposed vote threshold. EC told them that as per laws, only parties that met the vote threshold could be recognised as national parties and all their candidates could get one election symbol.
EC Spokesperson Shaligram Sharma Paudel said that parties' representatives urged the EC to form a cyber bureau to monitor and prevent attempts by some to use social networking sites to indulge in character assassination.
Advocate Baburam Dahal, who represented the CPN-UML, said UML leaders who split the mother party to from CPN (Unified Socialist) cannot get recognition of a separate party as the ordinance that facilitated the split of the party had already been rescinded by the president.
He also opposed the EC's decision to use green ballot papers for local elections.
He said in the last local, provincial, and parliamentary elections, the poll panel had used blue, red, green, and black ballot papers.
Key figures
• 79 parties contesting local polls
• 17,834,765 voters to exercise their right to franchise
• 9,048,213 men to cast votes
• 717,067: The number of voters in Morang, the highest in any district
• 640,058: The number of voters in Kathmandu
A version of this article appears in the print on March 12, 2022, of The Himalayan Times
