Chief Election Commissioner AMM Nasir Uddin has said that the voting rights of people will be restored at any cost.
"People have lost interest in voting due to the lack of opportunities, and we aim to address their regrets," he said while inaugurating the voter list updating programme-2025 at the Savar Upazila Parishad auditorium on Monday morning.
The CEC said that the voting rights will be realised when common people will be able to vote for their preferred candidate without fear.
During the event, election commissioners urged data collectors to remain vigilant, as the number of female voters in the latest update programme was alarmingly low.
They have also warned against voters who vote in two places simultaneously.
The door-to-door data collection campaign will continue till February 3 and the collection of biometric data of the eligible voters will be taken from February 5 to April 11.
During the field-level data collection campaign, enumerators will collect the data of eligible voters who were born on and before January 1, 2008.
Besides, the enumerators will collect applications from the existing voters who intended to change voting addresses and the data of deceased voters for dropping their names from the voter list.
According to the Electoral Training Institute, more than 66,000 people have already received training over the voter listing updating programme. The trained people include 55,016 enumerators and 11,801 supervisors.
The EC will publish the draft updated electoral rolls incorporating the names of new voters on January 2, 2026. Following the resettlement of claims and objections, the commission will make the final electoral rolls on March 2, 2026.
The Election Commission has recently issued a notification with 16 instructions for the officials and enumerators who will be engaged in the data collection drive.
The instructions include collection of data of those persons who had been born on and before January 1, 2008 but have remained out of the voter lists, ascertaining if such persons became voters in the past, writing proper spelling of names of possible voters in both Bangla and English and being careful so that the data of Rohingyas and foreign nationals could no way be collected.
According to the existing voter lists (published on March 2, 2024), there are 121.85 million (121,850,160) voters in the country.
