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EC allows upazila chairmen to join nat'l poll

State Correspondent
The Election Commission yesterday allowed Upazila Parishad chairmen to contest in the upcoming national poll without resigning from their posts.
The EC took the decision after hearing appeals against cancellation of candidatures for being a bank defaulter or upazila chairman among others.
A total of 1,107 nominations were filed with the returning officers around the country but 260 applications were cancelled. Of them, 138 appealed against the decision.
The EC yesterday completed hearing 60 appeals and gave verdicts on 30. Of those, 16 candidates got approval, while nominations of 14 others were cancelled, said EC officials.
Delivering the verdicts, the commission declared the candidatures of upazila chairmen, which were cancelled, valid.
The returning officers had cancelled their candidature, saying upazila chairmen hold "office of profit" of the government.
LIST OF POLLING
CENTRES
The EC yesterday sent the final list of polling centres for the upcoming election to the Bangladesh Government Press for printing it as a gazette.
For each of the 300 con-stituencies, there will be a separate gazette containing the list of the polling centres in that constituency, said Mihir Sarwar Morshed, deputy secretary of the EC Secretariat.
"We've finalised a total of 37,711 polling centres all over the country. After printing the gazettes, we will send those to the returning officers of the constituencies," he told The Daily Star.
In the last election, the number of polling centres was 35,263 but it rose as the number of voters has increased by over 1 crore to around 9.19 crore.
Meanwhile, around 23,000 local observers of 38 organisations have appealed to the EC to observe the January 5 election. The EC in
principle has decided to allow them all. In the 9th parliamentary election, around 1.68 lakh local observers monitored the polling, according to EC sources.
Among international observers, Democracy International has appealed to deploy 13,500 monitors.
The EC has already invited around 10 international bodies including the Commonwealth, Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC), European Union, National Democratic Institute, and International Republican Institute to deploy monitors but none has responded yet, said EC sources.
In the 2008 poll, the number of foreign observers was over 500.