Sri Lanka, April 28 -- The bets are on that nobody would be able to gain 50 percent of the vote in any presidential election that would be held in the near future. What would seasoned political commentators say? Here we go again?

The 50 per cent issue has been brought up before every presidential election, and in almost all instances various pundits have speculated that the vote would go into a second round where second preferences would be counted. But it never happened in any past contests for president in this country.

Talk about the arc of history. If history was written according to the prognostications of pundits, aliens would probably be ruling the planet by now. But, each time a pundit made a prediction either before an election...