Preparations for elections completed in three Kathmandu Valley prisons

KATHMANDU: Inmates in prison are exercising their right to vote in the House of Representatives and State Assembly member elections on Sunday for the first time.

It has been arranged for inmates whose names are on the voter’s list and who have been convicted of election offenses to vote for the House of Representatives’ proportional representation.

Meanwhile, the relevant office has reported that all election preparations have been completed in three Kathmandu Valley prisons. 182 inmates in two Kathmandu prisons and one in Lalitpur will be allowed to cast their votes.

110 inmates from the Kathmandu prison office, 20 from Jagannath Dewal, and 52 from the Lalitpur prison office will vote. The Jagannath Dewal prison has over 3,400 inmates, 650 in Kathmandu, and 1,420 in Lalitpur.

The deputy secretary of the office, Ved Prasad Kharel, informed that all election preparations had been completed in the Jagannath Dewal prison office. He stated that the voting materials had been delivered from the election officer’s office. On Sunday, voting will begin at 7 a.m.

From this time, the Commission has arranged voting for the House of Representatives’ proportional election system, including employees and security personnel, people in nursing homes, inmates and detainees in prisons, and those convicted of election offenses whose names are on the voter’s list but are not present at the polling station.

To that end, 141 temporary polling stations have been established across the country. For the first time since Nepal’s Constitution was issued in 2072, the Commission has implemented the system of voting by temporary voters. There are 450,000 temporary voters in the country.