42,000 Bangladeshi expats seek voter registration abroad

Around 42,000 Bangladeshi expatriates from seven countries have applied for voter registration through Bangladeshi missions over the past one and a half years.

According to the latest data from the Election Commission Secretariat, Bangladeshi mission offices abroad have collected the biometrics of some 20,000 applicants.

So far, 11,500 national identity (NID) cards have been printed, with 9,500 already dispatched to the respective missions following the completion of the registration process.

Besides, around 4,000 applications were rejected on various grounds, while the remaining applications are at different stages of processing.

The Election Commission launched its expatriate voter registration and NID services in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in July 2023, Italy in February 2024, Kuwait and Qatar in May 2024, the United Kingdom (UK) in June 2024, and Saudi Arabia and Malaysia in July 2024.

Now the services are available at 11 Bangladeshi missions across these seven countries, but the commission plans to expand voter and NID registration services to 40 countries to accommodate the Bangladeshi diaspora worldwide.

As part of this expansion, the services will be introduced in Australia and Canada in April next.

In January last, the Electoral System Reform Commission in its report also recommended expediting the registration of expatriate Bangladeshis as voters using passport database information, enabling them to participate in the next general election through postal balloting.

It also proposed creating a technical taskforce to introduce an online voting system alongside postal balloting to facilitate expatriate voting.

The reform commission emphasised registering all expatriates in the electoral rolls and national identity server swiftly.

"Since all expatriate Bangladeshis have passports, the registration process should be completed in a faster way using the information stored in the passport database," the commission says.

The commission recommended that expatriates registered by October 2025 be allowed to vote in the national election through a proposed postal voting system.

 "Some 42,000 expatriates applied from seven foreign countries. The EC has so far approved 18,000 applications and rejected 4,000 applications. The remaining applications are now pending in different stages of the voter registration," said Md Abdul Momin Sarkar, Director (Registration and Expatriates) at the EC's National Identity Registration Cell.

As of 3 March 2025, some 11,500 smart NID cards were printed and 9,500 smart cards have already been sent to the mission offices in the seven countries for the distribution among the expatriates, he said.

Besides, some 20,000 other expatriate Bangladeshis were registered as voters taking the services from one-stop services desk of EC expatriate cell in Bangladesh in the last two years, said the EC official.

Asked as to why so few expatriates are interested to be registered as voters, he said millions of expatriates are now voters as most of the expatriates go abroad after getting voters and many other expatriates became voters when they returned to Bangladesh on different occasions, he said.

the slow disposal of their applications, the EC officials said no EC's staff is posted in the 11 Bangladeshi missions for this purpose and the officials of the missions do this task as their additional job.

According to a separate statistics prepared a few days ago by the EC Secretariat, a total of 34,040 applications were received from the seven countries. The highest 11,233 applications were received from UAE, while 7,438 from the UK, 5,817 from Italy, 3,362 from Kuwait, 2,934 from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), 2,417 from Qatar and 839 from Malaysia.

There is no specific statistics over how many expatriate Bangladeshis are exactly now in the foreign lands now as the EC received different statistics about it from the Bureau of Manpower, Employment and Training (BMET) and the Foreign Ministry.

According to the statistics of BMET, a total of 1,60,75,487 Bangladeshi workers went abroad from 1976 to 2023. Among them, the highest 57,78,634 in Saudi Arabia, 26,02,026 in UAE, 6,89,692 in Kuwait, 18,84,445 in Oman, 9,02,451 in Qatar, 4,10,485 in Bahrain, 2,71,261 in Lebanon, 2,19,005 in Jordan, 1,23,037 in Libya, 12,476 in Sudan, 14,59,000 in Malaysia, 9,38,365 in Singapore, 52,774 in South Korea, 21,576 in UK, 80,646 in Italy, 3,707 in Japan, 23,158 in Egypt, 78,366 in Brunei, 78,390 in Mauritius, 75,909 in Iraq, 3,27,348 in other countries.