VOTER TURN TO INCREASE - KARAVAKI

(May 11th, 2006 No. 84)

One hundred and eighty six (186) polling stations were in operation today the Supervisor of Elections, Semesa Karavaki said today.

And providing figures of voter turn out from the field, Mr Karavaki said they continued to remain provisional figures because they continue to come in from remote polling stations.

As of Saturday, 6th May the first day of polling, he said the figure of voter turn out is 31,571 and a remarkable increase was experienced on the second day Monday, with 45,241 provisional voter turnout.

And on the third day (Tuesday) he said, voter turn figures was about 48,868 adding that this number is likely to increase when total number of votes cast come in from the third polling day.

Voting yesterday, Mr Karavaki said was 33,444 which is of course still provisional and expected to rise.

“We are looking at a consistent increase of the figures of the number of voters as we started slowly from Saturday and there is a consistent increase from Saturday. We are hoping that today and tomorrow the figures for all this turnout will exceed the numbers of the total votes cast in the last few days,” he said.

On concerns about the printing of ballot papers, the Supervisor clarified that as a general rule about 1.9 percent of votes per constituency are printed.

“As I said yesterday this is not an unusual practice, we make sure that there is an adequate number of ballot papers for voters to use wherever they might choose to vote.

“I’m sure you will agree that it is better to have a control over-supply of ballot papers, then not enough.

“The voters have every right to expect a good level of service and we’re trying our best to achieve that across the country. We have experienced in the past few days the number of polling stations that have had to run back to the headquarters to get additional supply of ballot papers,” he said.

In the case of polling in Lau, Mr Karavaki also said if there was not an adequate system of communication, they would not have known that polling officials in Lau had run out of ballot papers and required some more in the past few days.

Meanwhile, the Supervisor also clarified the issue of the ballot boxes filled with votes cast that were carted from Kaba and picked up by officials on Kiuva island on Tuesday.

What happened, he said was that the polling on Kaba island only took half a day and the other half was to be carried out on Kiuva island.

And upon arrival in Kiuva, the ballot box team from Nausori were waiting for these officials to hand over the filled ballot boxes of votes cast from Kaba island.

“So the ballot box that was used on Kaba, was then taken over by the ballot box team and taken to the headquarters because they had conducted polling in Kaba and had to conduct polling for that the later part of that day in Kiuva.

“That is the reason for that and I believe that is the usual practice you know that it has been taken across, then to create more work for the polling team by carting those boxes.”

On problems at polling stations, Mr Karavaki said he continued to receive information of voters facing some difficulties in getting both their ballot papers, communal and open ballot papers.

“We are continuing to advise the presiding officers to understand the practice to avoid sending the voters looking for the polling stations where both ballot papers would be available for.

The exercise that we are going through now is a very massive exercise and we have ballot boxes that need to be moved from very remote polling stations on their way to the count centres,” he stressed.

And as mentioned in the last few days, Mr Karavaki said that most of these ballot boxes need to go through the headquarters to be verified and at times these ballot boxes were released in the morning to the count centres.

“Again this is to confirm that nothing had taken place,” he said.

On the issue of people printing similar types of ballot papers, Mr Karavaki said it would be impossible to do this because when the ballot papers are detached from the book, their line number and page number are recorded on the butt.

Therefore, he said when one comes out of polling from the voting booth to drop the papers in the box, a ballot box guard is there to check that the ballot paper brought before being dropped into the slot contains the stamp and the initial and they also check that only one type of ballot paper and it should be the right ballot paper goes into the box.

“I think if there are some people that are entertaining this kind of thinking I think it’s very important for the media to educate members of the public, the people of the procedure.

“I say this and I invite the media to be also responsible for printing the electoral information in the dailies because it’s very important for people to understand.

“Because people might think there is something improper going on, I say this because you are the one that I refer to, I think it appears in the dailies,” he said.

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