Hundreds of thousands of votes cast in the recent federal and provincial assembly elections have been invalid, according to the Election Commission (EC) website.
The EC had said a total of 10,587,521 votes were cast in the federal and provincial elections. But just 9,544,744 of the votes for proportional representation (PR) electoral system for the House of Representatives were valid which means 1,042,777 votes (9.84%) were invalid.
The rate of invalid votes is even higher for provincial assembly elections going by the EC website. Just 9,019,430 votes for PR system for provincial assembly elections were valid which means 14.81 percent of votes were invalid.
EC Spokesperson Nava Raj Dhakal, however, claimed that there must be some errors in calculation of invalid votes. "Invalid votes should not be higher than five percent. We cannot say accurately until the final results arrive," he told Setopati. "There was a single PR ballot for both federal and provincial elections. The invalid votes may have been counted twice, once for federal and once for provincial," he argued.
The EC has been spending hundreds of millions for voter education in each election. It mobilizes thousands of volunteers at the local level and also broadcasts advertisements to teach voters how to vote.
But the preliminary data of invalid votes has raised questions about effectiveness of voter education.
Votes Cast on November 26: 2,072,657
Votes Cast on December 7: 8,514,864
Total Votes: 10,587,521
Valid PR Votes for HoR: 9,544,744
Valid PR Votes for Provincial Assembly
Province 1: 1,736,622
Province 2: 1,537,171
Province 3: 1,891,306
Province 4: 956,919
Province 5: 1,612,180
Province 6: 494,162
Province 7: 791,070
Total: 9,019,430
