Counting to start after ballots checked: Claudio

COUNTING for the ballots of the Bougainville Referendum polling will start after all provisional ballots are adjudicated according to the decision of the BRC board, says chief referendum officer Mauricio Claudio.
Claudio said to ensure a fair and equitable process counting had to wait until all provisional ballots were adjudicated and once ballots were in the mix then the actual counting could get underway.
“Before we do that, there will be a bit of a re-tooling around the count centre, moving around the tables so that there is greater visibility over the counting of the ballot papers,” he said.
Claudio said they would be taking counting officials through a refresher course, stressing the criteria of the process.
“As we reported before, there will be no progressive results announced.
“We will be periodically announcing progressive progress, how far into the process of counting we are but we won’t have any results, meaning that we won’t be releasing progressive results of how many votes have been received for one option or the other,” he said.
Claudio said almost all ballot boxes had been opened and verified with the process slightly ahead of schedule.
“The count teams continue to work well and effectively and congratulations are in order for the polling teams because we are finding that those materials inside the ballot boxes make sense and the journals are in order.
“We are working through the provisional ballots and so far we found about 9,000 of them. This is well short of the 15,000 provisional ballot envelops that we originally printed and anticipated.
“Of those 9,000 provisional ballots found and making their way to the systems, about 60 per cent have been verified and of those 60 per cent verified, about three quarters of them have been admitted.
“We also have about a thousand declaration ballots and these tend to vary from box to box,” he said.