Sri Lanka presidential election: All you need to know

Sri Lanka presidential election will be held on Saturday (September 21) with incumbent Ranil Wickremesinghe seeking re-election in a three-way battle.

President Wickremesinghe, the main Opposition leader Sajith Premadasa and the Marxist JVP leader Anura Kumara Dissanayake are the front-runners in the election which has 38 candidates, the largest ever pool in the history of the island nation.

Here is all you need to know about the Sri Lanka Presidential election.

Polling begins at 7 am and ends at 4 pm (nine hours of polling) on Saturday, September 21

Total electorate: Over 17 million (17,140,354)

Number of candidates on ballot paper: 39 (one died but his name remains there)

Number of women candidates: 0

Number of polling stations: 13,421

Number of election officials: More than 225,000

Number of police personnel on duty: 63,000

Estimated cost of election: Over 10 billion Sri Lankan rupees ($33 million)

The voters are eligible to vote at the election for a direct vote to elect an executive president for a 5-year term

This will be the first election since the worst economic crisis in the country in 73 years

The President of Sri Lanka is elected using a preferential voting system, whereby voters can rank up to three candidates in order of preference

A total of 116 representatives from various international election observation organisations have arrived in Sri Lanka to monitor the election

Empty boxes and sealed packages of ballots will be kept at district secretariats (in 22 electoral districts)) overnight. Counting begins soon after the voting ends but results will come from about Sunday morning (September 22) due to the long and slow process of manual counting

The country is divided into 160 polling divisions. The results will be issued from different polling divisions

The counting of postal votes, that is the ballots of officials involved in the election, will begin within 15 minutes of the polling stations closing

The final tallies will be known towards Sunday morning. No timeline for this. If no candidate gets 50 per cent, then there will be the counting of second preferences

In the Presidential election of 2019, the voter turnout was 83.72 per cent