Sri Lanka is preparing to conduct its next Presidential Election on 21 September 2024, which will see 38 candidates contesting. 

The election will kick off with postal voting being held on the first week of September, with the postal ballots having already been distributed.

Leading up to the election, Manthri.lk, which profiles the activities of each Parliamentarian, has listed five key facts on the nation’s past Presidential Elections. 

1. Polonnaruwa is the only district that has consistently voted for the winner during the past 8 presidential elections. This makes Polonnaruwa the only bellwether district in Sri Lanka’s presidential election history.
2. G.G. Ponnambalam (1982) & Osvin Abeygunasekara (1988) are the only two presidential candidates, aside from the winner and runner-up, to have won a polling division in a presidential election. Ponnambalam is the only such candidate to have also won an electoral district.
3. The North-Central, Western and Southern are the only provinces that have produced an elected president, containing the ‘home’ district of the presidents elected from 1982 to 2019.
4. There have only been 4 female candidates who have contested during the past 8 presidential elections. In 1994, Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga became the first female president of Sri Lanka, obtaining more than 60% of the votes.
5. The lowest gap of votes between the winner and the runner-up was reported in the 2005 presidential election. Mahinda Rajapaksa became the president by obtaining 1.86% more votes than Ranil Wickremasinghe. That’s just 180,786 votes, in an election where 3,500,382 people didn’t vote. (Newswire)