Addressing electoral readiness, Akhtar Ahmed noted that political parties registered with the EC are legally required to submit audited financial statements for the previous calendar year by July 31. So far, 30 of 51 registered parties have submitted their audit reports, while 15 have requested deadline extensions.

Among the six newly registered parties, one stated it was not yet eligible to submit an audit due to the timing of its registration. The other five did not respond. The Commission will now decide on the next course of action.

Tthe EC received 148 applications for new political party registration by the June 22 deadline, of which three were duplicates. The remaining 145 applicants were asked to submit additional documents to resolve inconsistencies.

As of now, 80 parties have submitted the required documents, six have sought extensions, and 59 have not responded. The cases will be placed before the Commission for further directives.

The EC is set to publish two supplementary voter lists on August 10 — one for newly eligible voters (born on or before January 1, 2007) and another listing deceased voters to be removed from the rolls.

Corrections, address changes, or objections can be submitted by August 21. Following review and validation, the updated final voter roll will be published on August 31.

The EC will release three separate voter lists this year. Of them, the first list was published on March 2; the second, which includes supplementary data, is scheduled for August 31 and the third list will be issued based on a new cut-off date before the election schedule is announced.

As per the March 2 update, Bangladesh currently has 123,732,274 registered voters.