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ELECTORAL Commission
“forced” security forces to engage in events that were outside the
original national election operations order.
This caused the forces to push their budgets beyond the limits, thus,
incurring debts which are yet to be settled.
The PNG Defence Force air, land and sea elements were the worst
affected.
Major Eddie Yodu, who was the election officer on the ground, revealed
this in Lae yesterday during the PNGDF’s presentation on the elections
operation.
He said the Electoral Commission needed to keep the non-capabilities in
the regions while the important ones were taken care of.
“We need to have in-dept planning to avoid 11th hour dash,” Major Yodu
said.
He said some of the instances where PNGDF fleets were forced to divert
course included the transportation of the 110 ballot boxes from Manus to
Kavieng after mistakenly being sent there.
Another case was the request by the Electoral Commission to PNGDF seven
days before the start of election operations for the Arava aircraft to
fly ballot boxes and papers to Tapini in Central province.
Lt Col Mae also called on the Electoral Commission to reconsider setting
up polling booths close to each other so that officers could be closer
together.
“We need competent electoral officers because half of the security
issues were caused by them (Electoral Commission officers),” Col Mae
said, adding that some officials did not obey instructions which
resulted in the “hijacking” of ballot boxes in some areas.
PNGDF deployed 400 members operating within the budget of K12.4 million
from the initial budget of K60 million.
From this, about K5 million was used for the operations while about
K6.474 million was used to recover assets.
 
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