Supervisor of Elections must resign or be dismissed

[posted 11 May 2006, 1700]

Labour Leader Mahendra Chaudhry has called on the Constitutional Offices Commission to dismiss the Supervisor of Elections Mr Semesa Karavaki for gross incompetence and inefficiency.

Mr Chaudhry has also accused Mr. Karavaki of lying to, and misleading the nation, to cover up for the huge mess he has made of the 2006 general elections.

Mr. Karavaki has blamed the voters who despite having resgistration slips do not have their names on the electoral roll, saying that they should have checked their names in the main rolls when these were published.

The provisional rolls printed by the Elections Office contained the names of those voters only who had registered up to 31st December 2005. the names of voters who registered in 2006 were not in the provisional rolls.

The truth is that the final main electoral rolls used for polling purposes were not made available to the public for scrutiny. How could they then have checked their names?

Final main rolls were made available to political parties and candidates only in the electronic format just days before they were printed and despatched to the various District Offices. The public did not have any opportunity to scrutinise the rolls.

In the case of the Fiji security guards in Iraq, he is again misleading the nation. When these 4000 Fiji citizens opted to do postal balloting, they were told this was not necessary as officials from the Elections Office would be visiting Iraq to take their votes.

Now Mr. Karavaki is asking these people to travel to Kuwait at their own cost to vote. “Mr Karavaki must accept responsibility for disenfranchising thousands of voters. He should admit gross incompetence on his part and resign or be dismissed,” said Mr. Chaudhry.