Fiji opposition leaders question integrity of election

A group of opposition party leaders in Fiji are calling for a halt to vote counting and an audit of the country's electoral system.

This comes after provisional results, displayed on a Fiji Election Office app, showing a clear lead for the opposition People's Alliance Party (PAP) over the ruling Fiji First Party were stopped due to an upload error that the electoral office said redistributed the allocation of votes displayed in the app.

The app was taken offline for several hours and then restarted in the early hours of Thursday morning showing an almost unassailable lead for the ruling Fiji First Party over all other parties.

Speaking for a group of political parties at a media conference in Suva on Thursday afternoon the leader of the PAP, Sitiveni Rabuka, said the anomaly raised questions about the integrity of the entire electoral system.

"We now call for an immediate halt in the tallying of votes until an urgent forensic audit of the electoral system is conducted," Rabuka said.

"The leaders have put the Electoral Commission on notice that they are seriously considering non-compliance because of the questionable results so far announced."

Other political party leaders at the conference were Biman Prasad of the National Federation Party, Savenaca Narube of Unity Fiji, and Mahendra Chaudhry of the Fiji Labour Party.

Rabuka said in the coming days they intend on holding public meetings to share with voters their thoughts on the events that transpired after polls closed on Wednesday.

"The serious problem of anomalies or glitches in the election system app … call into question the integrity of the entire system," Rabuka said.

Supervisor of Elections demands evidence

But Supervisor of Elections Mohammed Saneem said the leaders were either misguided or misinformed about the election counting processes and urged them to come forward with evidence to back their claims.

"With all due respect to people that are making statements, I urge you to ensure that your statements are filled with accuracy," Saneem said.

Saneem reiterated that the glitch on Wednesday night, which displayed inaccurate results on the app, occurred during the uploading of data to the app.

The integrity of the result management system - an offline server - was never compromised, he said.

Speaking to media on Thursday in the counting centre in Suva, Saneem implored camera people to film the manual counting process going on in the background and pointed out the political party agents that were present to witness the process at each counting station.

"The political parties asked us to give the scanned copy of the protocol of results because they can't all get the pink copy from the polling stations so we are giving it to them," Saneem said.

"In addition to that, we are also giving them the final result that is also being entered into the results management system."

The elections chief accused the political party leaders of misleading the public about the transparency of the process.

He said the provisional results were those that were called into the results centre on the night of the elections.

"Final results are actually direct data entry from the white sheets of paper that are signed and witnessed at the polling station that we use to record the results," Saneem said.

The reason the final results would take up to Sunday to complete was because the paper slips were physically transported to the results centre from all around the country, he said.

Despite all of the posturing, he had yet to receive any formal complaints from the political parties concerned and he would address those claims when and if an official complaint was lodged, Saneem said.

"They are not even here. They are not even at the results centre… So first they should start coming to the results centre then you can make all these calls that you want."