Voting in Maldivian parliamentary elections opened Saturday under the supervision of a special Commonwealth monitoring group from the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation. Voting commenced at 7.00 a.m. (0200 GMT) and is due to continue until 8.00 p.m. in some 300 polling stations in all inhabited islands of the country, where only 156,000 are eligible to vote. Elections were earlier scheduled for December 31 in the island nation with a population of 275,000, but was postponed after the December 26 tsunami, which claimed the lives of 82 people on the islands. "For the first time we have allowed the Commonwealth team to monitor the elections. They are free to visit any of the islands and observe how voting goes on," said Mohamed Asim, the Maldivian High Commissioner in Colombo.
