With only about seven months in hand to make things ready for the election, the EC is yet to fix the dates for publication of the draft and the final versions of the electoral roll it has been preparing since January amid a wide-scale controversy.

The difficulties the EC is in have mainly stemmed from the stubborn attitude of Chief Election Commissioner MA Aziz towards the opinions of his two initial colleagues, who have all along been opposed to going for a fresh voter list.

With the backing of the government that appointed two new election commissioners to provide him with a majority in the commission, the CEC ignored the January 4 High Court directives to update the existing electoral roll and thus aggravated the crisis.

The fieldwork of fresh voter listing ended on March 30, allegedly keeping a large number of eligible voters outside the roll.

Though officials at the EC Secretariat say they will revise the existing voter list if a fresh one cannot be made, many voters are sure to be left out due to the time constraint. As the procedure of revising an existing roll is almost the same as that of preparing a new one, it will be difficult to execute the task accurately within the remaining short span of time.

In case of the current voter list, the EC started preparing it on May 15, 2000 and published it on October 26, almost a year before the 2001 election held on October 1. The EC Secretariat officials say the list was printed in February 2001, over seven months ahead of the last parliamentary election.

But this time the EC started voter listing on January 1 last, only one year ahead of the upcoming polls, and set June 1, 2006 as the date for its publication. After wasting no less than three months on legal complications, the list is now sure to miss that publication deadline.

The EC will have to announce the election schedule by November, with the election date no later than in early January 2007. Once the caretaker government takes over following the dissolution of the current parliament on October 27, the commission will have no time to work on the electoral roll. So, the EC has now a little more than seven months to complete the task before announcing the election schedule.

Still, CEC Aziz and Acting EC Secretary Mohammad Zakoria have been asserting that the voter list will be ready in time. "The draft voter list will be published soon and we will be able to complete the task in time," Zakoria told reporters last week.

But officials at the EC Secretariat and voter registration officers say, even after publication of the draft voter list, it will need at least eight months to finalise and print the list. "It will be difficult even if the commission goes for revising the existing voter list," says a senior election officer.

Meanwhile, after issuing a suo moto contempt rule against the CEC and a BNP lawmaker last Monday, the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court said the CEC's leave to appeal petition against the High Court directives will remain adjourned until disposal of the contempt issue.

While the EC has to wait for the outcome of its appeal before it can fix the publication date of the draft voter list, the voter-listing fieldwork has come to a halt due to fund crisis and fear of legal complications, sources said.

However, the EC Secretariat in a circular on April 2 claimed the preparation of the draft list was complete and the work of further scrutiny was going on. But the district election officers contradicted the claim.

"It's not true... the task of preparing the draft voter list is not completed yet. The assistant registration officers are not signing the draft lists fearing it would be a contempt of court, as the matter is pending with the court," a district election officer told The Daily Star last Wednesday on condition of anonymity.

Even if the EC can publish the draft voter list today, it will have to wait for another four months to publish the final list after going through several steps.

After the draft list publication, the EC will have to receive objections and dispose those of by appointing revision authorities. The EC in its December 7 schedule of fresh voter listing allotted four months for this phase alone.

And, after publication of the final list, it will have to undertake the massive job of printing it. It will need at least two months to award the printing work order as per the Public Procurement Rules and the printing itself will require a few more months. It took about five months to print the existing voter list.

All this means the EC will need at least eight to 10 months as against the seven months remaining to complete the entire process.

Talking to The Daily Star last week a number of district election officers said they do not know how the commission will manage the task within such a short time. "We have to do the work in an unprecedented hurry," observed one of them.