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Poll officials resign en
masse in Morobe
By PETER KORUGL and YEHURA HRIEHWAZI
THE 2007 general election in Morobe
province is headed for disaster.
All the election managers resigned en masse yesterday in protest over
the poor state of preparedness for the elections in PNG’s largest
province with 10 seats in Parliament.
They submitted their resignation letters to the Morobe election steering
committee representative and deputy administrator Patilias Gamato – only
nine working days before issue of writs on May 4.
Upon receiving their letters, Mr Gamato admitted the elections in Morobe
“will definitely be a disaster”.
“The Electoral Commission will have to organise its own people to run
the elections in Morobe,” he said after being served with the
resignation letters at the Morobe provincial disaster centre. The
director of the disaster centre Roy Kamen is returning officer of Lae
Open electorate. He was among those who resigned.
Mr Gamato said the decision to accept the resignation or not would be
made when the provincial administrator had a chance to look at the
matter but the resignation effectively ended the involvement of the
Morobe administration in the running of the elections.
The nine returning officers for the nine electorates and 35 assistant
returning officers tendered their resignation because “we do not want to
be blamed for a disastrous election”.
The election managers say not only are the people confused about the LPV
system that is to be used, but also reforms to the ballot papers and
other election issues.
Speaking before his resignation, Mr Kamen said there had been no LPV
awareness in Morobe province because the Electoral Commission did not
release the funds.
He said the committee had submitted costings for the awareness but the
commission was too slow and time had run out.
“There was no time for us to go and conduct awareness and then rush back
to accept nominations,” Mr Kamen said.
The returning officers told Mr Gamato they had resigned because of the
delay in the release of funds by the Electoral Commission, lack of
logistic support from the Electoral Commission, lack of LPV awareness
and no proper co-ordination between Morobe administration and Electoral
Commission.
The election managers said they would only return to work when all
election funding for Morobe was released as per the budget they had
submitted in January.
They men also demanded the Electoral Commission to release the final
electoral rolls by June 1 for checking.
Mr Gamato described the election officials as very experienced men who
had run three or four elections already.
He said even if they get money this week, there was not enough time to
do a good job of carrying out the awareness of PLV and the other reforms
relating to the elections.
He said Morobe had 10 electorates and was a difficult place and very
big, where all forms of transportation were used to carry out important
awareness programmes and it would be impossible to cover all parts of
the province in the time left before the writs are issued.
The Department of Morobe was reluctant to send its officers out to rural
communities to carry out the awareness exercises during the campaign
period because there was the possibility that it could be mistaken for
election campaign by the candidates or political parties.
 
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