SODELPA has repeatedly made misconstrued and misinformed statements - Saneem

Supervisor of Elections Mohammed Saneem says SODELPA has continued to disregard their calls to seek clarifications through formal means and the party has repeatedly made misconstrued and misinformed statements in the media and social media.

In a press conference, Saneem has stated that it is inaccurate for SODELPA to say that 208 polling stations from Tailevu and Ra are registered to Kadavu or the Eastern Division and they should have first made clarifications with the Fijian Elections Office.

SODELPA Leader Sitiveni Rabuka has said in the party's social media page that anomalies in the voter roll issued on August 1st by the Fijian Elections Office do not raise confidence in the Supervisor of Elections and the Electoral Commission.

Rabuka had said that the anomaly in question is where 208 Polling Stations from Ra and Tailevu Provinces with 65,540 voters had been allocated or moved to Kadavu Province.

He says the error was discovered by party staff reviewing the Roll issued by the Elections Office and the error increased the total number of voters in the Eastern Division by over 65,500, when the previous total was only about 25,000 registered voters.

Saneem has stated that the whole country is a single constituency and the Fijian Elections Office does not reflect its areas based on provincial boundaries.

He says they have transitioned from provincial boundary based delineation system called constituencies into a single constituency.

Saneem adds that in order to ensure that voters are not confused that they have to vote amongst their own constituency or the political parties do not mistakenly believe that election is run on constituency basis, they have moved away from this traditional provincial distribution of the country.

Saneem says they have carefully distributed the entire country into 25 administration areas which will be looked after by 23 administrative staff.

He has stressed that they are not required to distribute the entire country along provincial, district or town boundary lines.

Meanwhile, 634,120 people have registered to vote in the 2018 general election as at the 17th of this month.

The Central Division has the highest number of voters with 262,629 voters, Eastern Division has 25,877 voters, Western Division has 243,183 voters and the Northern Division has 94,390 voters.

8,041 voters are now registered from overseas and all of these voters are eligible for postal voting.