VOTER TURN OUT FOR FIRST TWO DAYS OF POLLING ABOUT 60,000

(May 10th, 2006 No. 77)

Correction has been made to the total number of voter turn out on the first day of polling.

Supervisor of Elections, Semesa Karavaki yesterday said the total number of votes given earlier was 49,000 however upon further verification, votes cast for this first day is about 30,000.

“So with that 30,000 and 29,077 cast on the first day and second day of polling, we had about 60,000 votes you know already cast on the first day and second day of polling,” he said.

The figure 29,077 Mr Karavaki said, is an accumulation of the Central Division 12,078, Northern Division 7676, the Eastern Division1,536, and the Western Division 7,786 of voter turnout.

And the number of polling stations that were opened in these four divisions on Monday were 48 in the Central, 58 in the North, 40 in the East and 63 in the Western Division.

Meanwhile, media reports from the West highlighted that people were allowed to vote even though their names was not in the roll and they had gone along to the polling stations with their green slips showing their code numbers.

Mr Karavaki clarified this issue, saying that people are not supposed to vote if their names are not registered in the electoral roll, whether or not they have their green slips with them.

“The authority for people to vote is actually the electoral roll,” he stressed.

“No one is allowed to vote if his or her name does not appear in the electoral roll. The clarification, I had sought from the Commissioner Western is exactly to the contrary of what is being printed in the paper and actually its where voters can only have their names found on the communal ballot papers,” Mr Karavaki said.

On the issue of excessive ballot papers raised in the Ba seat, Mr Karavaki clarified that in any election management the number of ballot papers must be more than the number of registered papers in any constituency.

“It is not something that is extraordinary, it is the practice that the number of ballot papers printed must be more than the number of registered voters in any constituency.

“In the kind of system we have, we don’t have the system that calls the polling stations-designated polling stations. If we have designated polling stations then we can print exactly the number of ballot papers.”

He added that the kind of system we have will have to provide sufficient number of ballot papers to all polling stations within the constituency because we do not know and no one can predict where majority of the voters will go during the polling period.

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