As the voter registration process gets ready to kick off within a month’s time, Attorney General and Minister for Elections Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum stressed that the process will ensure that it eliminates voter fraud.
In an interview with Fijivillage, Sayed-Khaiyum said SDL leader Laisenia Qarase is just involved in political point scoring by making comments earlier that the recruitment of the voter registration clerks should be done by the Elections Office and not the Ministry of Justice.
Qarase said the process should be independent and the Supervisor of Elections should oversee the recruitments.
Sayed-Khaiyum said the voter registration process will be carried out by Canadian company, Code Inc, and he stressed that it will be a transparent process and they will introduce a system never seen in Fiji.
Sayed-Khaiyum raised the question on whether Qarase wants positive changes as far as the electoral process is concerned as the Minister for Elections said there were many flaws highlighted in the EU Observer Report after the 2006 elections.
Some of the flaws highlighted in the 2006 EU report included 101 percent voter turnout in a constituency in Cakaudrove, composition of the polling staff not reflecting Fiji’s ethnic communities resulting in parties like the Labour Party claiming that the officials had favoured the SDL, Electoral Commission lacking funding, lack of institutional knowledge due to the downsizing of the Office of the Supervisor of Elections, only 12 percent of polling stations being headed by females, the main voter roll not ready on time for public scrutiny which resulted in about 20,000 corrections and old traditional wooden ballot boxes being used as some parties claimed that the boxes had sufficient gaps beneath the lids to allow ballot papers to be inserted after the boxes were sealed.
Sayed-Khaiyum said these issues have to be fixed.
Meanwhile, the application period for the voter registration clerks ended at the end of last month.
The Ministry of Justice will now recruit 1,050 clerks after going through the applications.
Story by: Vijay Narayan
Voter registration process to eliminate voter fraud
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