Social media, the access to android phones and other advances in technology have put to the limelight, the National General Election; the country is aware that not all the elections that took place have ended smoothly.
The destruction of properties, hijacking of ballot boxes and the destruction of ballot papers during the electoral process is not new to Papua New Guinea but seeing the pictures and videos of the blatant disregard of a fair and free electoral process spread across social media is a reality that no longer remains in folklore.
The Electoral Commission’s lack of update of the voter roll, group voting, underage voting, double voting, hijacking of ballot papers, burning of ballot papers and destruction of property are compounding factors that seem to justify some act of violence towards the electoral process, in each instance it has become normal to most and a talking point of discussion, yet the situation seems to reach the extreme every election year.
Electoral Commissioner, Simon Sinai at a media conference admitted that having a new election management system in place could mitigate some of the issues being faced during the elections; he added that there are many options available.
“We have seen all these things happen before, even the first past the post system in the past had bought many problems, we changed it to the Limited Preferential Voting system, we thought it would alleviate some of these issues but the trend has not even improved; we look forward to working on finding better ways to improve the elections,” Sinai said.
There is more work to be done in the next five years before the next National General Elections, but the options for new and better ways to conduct elections according to Sinai must be accepted by the people of Papua New Guinea.
“We have talked with Government about the voter roll and electronic voting but there are many ways we can improve the election management system, we have discussed about bio-metric voting but Papua New Guineans must be ready to accept this situation, we should work with systems that we can understand,” Sinai said
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