Colombo: Sri Lankans on Saturday voted to elect a new president in the first elections since the economic meltdown in 2022. An overnight curfew was declared island-wide hours after polling ended and counting started immediately. Polling from 7 am to 4 pm went off peacefully with no violence or any security breach reported from anywhere across the 22 electoral districts.

The voter turnout out in Saturday's presidential election is expected to be 75 per cent, Director General Elections Saman Sri Ratnayaka declared. This would be lower than the 83 per cent polled in the previous presidential election held in November 2019.

Hours after counting of votes began soon after polling ended at 4 pm, the entire country was put under curfew from 10 pm till 6 am on Sunday to prevent any untoward incidents post-election, the police said.

The polls were held from 7 am to 4 pm local time at over 13,400 polling stations at 22 electoral districts in the election which had the highest number of candidates, 38, but no female aspirant for the top post.

The elections are crucial for incumbent president Ranil Wickremesinghe, who is seeking re-election as an independent claiming credit for putting the country on the road to economic recovery. Observers said voting in the northern district of Jaffna was on a slow trickle by mid day. A Tamil minority hardline group had discouraged people from voting in the run up to the election.

The counting of postal votes commenced immediately after the voting closed at 4 pm, officials said. Postal votes were cast by government employees, mostly election officials, military and police. The postal voting was conducted four days earlier.
The election saw the deployment of nearly 8,000 polls observers local and foreign. This included 116 international observers from the EU, Commonwealth, Asian network of elections and seven from the south Asian countries.

The People's Action for Free and Fair Elections (PAFFREL), the leading local group, deployed 4,000 local observers.Buddhist temple halls, schools and community centres were converted into polling stations.

The three-cornered electoral battle saw Wickremesinghe, 75, facing stiff competition from Anura Kumara Dissanayake, 56, of the National People's Power (NPP), and Sajith Premadasa, 57, of the Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB) and the main Opposition leader.

Wickremesinghe is seeking re-election for a five-year term as an independent candidate, riding on the success of his efforts to pull the country out of the economic crisis, which many experts hailed as one of the quickest recoveries in the world.

Sri Lanka had plunged into an economic crisis when the island nation declared sovereign default in mid-April of 2022, its first since gaining independence from Britain in 1948. Almost civil-war-like conditions and months of public protests led to the fleeing of the then president Gotabaya Rajapaksa.Wickremesinghe was appointed as president by Parliament a week after.

“It's a turning point for Sri Lanka to get away from conventional politics which destroyed the country and the conventional economy which destroyed the country... and (for) a new social system, and a political system,” Wickremesinghe said after casting his vote in Colombo.

Under Wickremesinghe, the rupee has stabilised, inflation has slowed to near zero from over 70 per cent during the peak of the economic crisis, economic growth has turned to positive from contraction, and government revenue has jumped sharply after new taxes and an increase in value added tax (VAT).

Though Wickremesinghe's recovery plan to tie rigid reforms linked to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) bailout was hardly popular, it helped Sri Lanka recover from successive quarters of negative growth. Dissanayake and Premadasa want to tinker with the IMF programme to give more economic relief to the public.

This time, the minority Tamil issue was not on the agenda of any of the three main contenders, instead, the nation's battered economy and its recovery had taken centre stage with all three front runners vowing to stick with the IMF bail-out reforms.

Sri Lanka's crisis proved to be an opportunity for Dissanayake, who had seen a surge of support due to his pledge to change the island's "corrupt" political culture.

After the counting, if no candidate receives more than 50 per cent of the votes, a second preferential vote count will be conducted.

Voters in Sri Lanka elect a single winner by ranking up to three candidates in order of preference. If a candidate receives an absolute majority, they will be declared the winner. If not, a second round of counting will commence, with second and third-choice votes then taken into account.

No election in Sri Lanka has ever progressed to the second round of counting, as single candidates have always emerged as clear winners based on first-preference votes.