Election Commission Chairman Mahinda Deshapriya in a letter to the Daily News clarified the news item titled “Provincial Council Elections cannot be postponed - Deshapriya”, carried on the June 12 Daily News issue.
The letter: “I regret to note that Ratnapura Special Correspondent for the Daily News, N D Rajadorai has misquoted me in the aforesaid article, wherein he had mentioned that I had said: “Earlier, the Election Commissioner had powers to act on his own. But now delays have occurred because there were three officers to take decisions.”
“This is contradictory to what I had told the media in Sinhala. I wanted to emphasise the importance of the collective decisions made by a three member Commission. When the Department of Elections was in existence, the decisions were made by the then Commissioner of Elections. At present, all the decisions have to be made collectively by the members of the Election Commission, including the Chairman.”