Colombo is the 2nd most populated district in Sri Lanka, with 1,709,209 registered voters. The district currently elects 19 of the 225 members of the Sri Lankan Parliament which is the highest number of members elected to the parliament from a single district.

Politically speaking Colombo used to be a UNP stronghold. Even In the 2010 general election which United People’s Freedom Alliance (UPFA) was able to win with 144 seats, they only won 10 seats from Colombo district.

In the last parliamentary election, United National Front for Good Governance (UNFGG) won 11 seats and UPFA won only 7 seats. But politics have swung once again. In the last presidential election, Gotabhaya Rajapaksha got 727,713 (53.19%) votes and was able to win the district comprehensively.

Colombo in General Election 2020

Numbers.lk conducted a national online poll between 20th July to 27th of July of 2020. We got 1,844 responses overall and 260 of them are from Colombo district.

Since it’s an online poll it’s difficult to achieve the random sampling of demographics that an election poll requires. Since we used the swing of voters from one party to another from the presidential election to the general election to forecast the outcome of the election.

For example, according to our poll, 84.06% present of the people who voted for SLPP in the presidential election will again vote for SLPP in the General Election, 7.25% said they will vote for Samagi Jana Balawegaya(SJB) and 4.35% said they will vote for JVP powered NMPP. Here is the full breakdown,

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According to our projections, here are the final predicted results of Colombo district:

Key Takeaways:

• SLPP will win 10 seats. SJB - 7 and UNP & JVP 1 each.

• UNP only gets 5.25% of the vote according to our analysis, 5% minimum limit is within the 3.0% margin or error of the poll which means there is a small chance that UNP will not win a seat from Colombo.

• According to our poll, we can say with very high confidence Ravi Karunanayaka will lose his seat after 26 years in the parliament.

• Mr Daya Gamage who decided to contest from Colombo district this time having elected to the parliament from Digamadulla will also lose his seat.

• Ranil Wickramasinghe will be the only member of parliament from Colombo district for UNP if they were able to win a seat.

• Anura Kumara Dissanayake will be elected to the parliament from Colombo district representing NMPP.

• Sajith Premadasa will get the highest number of preferential votes for SJB in Colombo with 76% of SJB voters casting a preferential vote for him.

• Our polling data suggests Rear Admiral Sarath Weerasekara may suppress Wimal Weerawansa in preferential votes race in SLPP.

  Note: We will be posting projections for other districts soon.
  Read More: EXPLAINED: Sri Lankan parliamentary electoral system