Out of the total 12 mayoral candidates to the Chittagong City Corporation elections, at least 10 might lose their security money, opined a number of voters, local politicians and election observers in the zone.
According to the Election Commission a candidate is not refunded with the deposit money, which is Tk50,000, if he fails to bag at least one-eighth of the total votes cast.
In the previous CCC polls held on June 17, 2010, majority of the votes were cast to BNP-backed M Manjur Alam, who won the race, and Awami League-backed candidate Mohiuddin Chowdhury.
Rest of six candidates who either belonged to other political parties or were independent candidates had to lose the money deposited to the Election Commission for poor turn out of votes for them.
This time, Manjur is competing with the election symbol orange from BNP while with ticket from the Awami League Nasir is running with the symbol elephant.
Upon talking to the voters and local politicians it was found that Manjur and Nasir were standing way ahead in terms of campaigning and drawing attention of the media compared to the other candidates.
A number of voters opined that a massive junk of votes might go to the two candidates. Supporters of Jamaat-e-Islami might cast their votes to BNP, as no candidate is running the race from Jamaat.
Jatiya Party backed candidate Solaiman Ali Sheth who bagged 2,083 votes in the previous polls, claimed that he might bag more votes this time. This year, a total of 1,813,449 voters will cast votes in 719 polling centres in the CCC polls.
To avoid loss of the deposit money, a candidate must bag a minimum of 103,609 votes. In the last two city corporation polls, candidates other than the BNP and Awami League backed ones, no one gained more than 20,000 votes.
Interestingly, a few candidates are taking part in the polls with the apprehension that they may not get desired number of votes which might save them from losing the security money. Syed Sajjad Zoha, who is running as an independent candidate with cricket bat symbol, bagged only 667 votes last time.
“I will get more votes this time. However, it is true that I will not get back the deposit money,” he told the Dhaka Tribune.
Zoha, who has an academic education up to Higher Secondary School Certificate (HSC), added: “I am taking part in the polls for my publicity. Tk50,000 is not a matter for me. If I had to deposit Tk5 lakh, still I would have participated. I will take part in the next polls in 2020 too.”
Beaming with confidence, Arif Moinuddin, a candidate backed by National Democratic Front, said: “Although, the media is not giving me enough coverage and I am not running a massive election campaign with plenty of posters, I believe that I will be the next mayor.”