With 90 National Council candidates nominated, the state will have to spend around Nu 22.5 M as campaign fund for the candidates. This is a decrease by around Nu 6 M from the 2018 National Council Elections. The current election will also have 37 fewer candidates. With all the candidates nominated, the election campaign officially begins today.
Each candidate will receive Nu 100,000 worth of campaign materials and Nu 150,000 in cash to cover campaign expenses. The campaign fund will be released on Thursday. Meanwhile, the scrutiny of nominations of candidates is underway.
“It is the returning officer who will be scrutinizing the documents that are submitted by the candidates. There are about thirteen to fourteen documents that are to be submitted by the candidates. So, the returning officers will be cross-checking whether they are accurate or not or whether whatever is required is submitted or not. So, these are some of the things that our returning officers will be doing today,” said Phub Dorji, Director of Secretariat, ECB.
A total of 485,303 voters were registered in the draft electoral roll for the 2023 National Council Elections, of which more than 236,000 are male and around 249,000 are female. The number of registered voters has increased by over 53,000 compared to the 2018 National Council election’s electoral roll.
The voters can verify and ensure that they are included in the electoral roll within 20th of this month.
“In case someone is excluded or somehow important information is missing from the electoral roll, they will be provided with what we call claim and objections so they will say I should be in this and in reflected in this so we make corrections during this period. The purpose of sending out draft electoral roll is to further make the electoral roll error-free,” said Phub Dorji.
The Draft Electoral Roll and Draft Postal Voters list can be viewed at the respective Dzongkhag Electoral Office, the Election Commission’s head office, or from the commission’s website.
Kinzang Lhadon
Edited by Kipchu
