Funding and time stand in way of electoral roll registrations

THE concept of registering persons to be on the electoral roll may seem simple but implementing this consumes a huge amount of time and resources, says Electoral Commissioner Patilias Gamato.
He was speaking at the southern region consultative workshop in Port Moresby yesterday in support of the proposed Civil and Identity Registration Bill 2018.
He said because of the complexities and the challenges involved, voter registration was rarely done to the complete satisfaction of stakeholders or election administrators.
“There are always groups or individuals who may seek to fraudulently sway the register, either by adding ineligible persons or by creating obstacles to registrations of legitimate voters,” Gamato said.
“Ineligible persons may include deceased persons, voters who no longer reside in the community, youths who have not reached eligible age, multiple registrations by the same individual or outright fictitious names.”
He said legitimate voters may be prevented from being registered by physical intimidation, social pressure, misinformation or lack of information, cumbersome administrative requirements, limited access to registration centres and lack of required identity document.
“Adequate reporting mechanism is non-existent in PNG,” Gamato said.
“This includes data collection on births, marriages, transfers and deaths.
“The reality is that any voter who is accurate today will be less accurate tomorrow unless effective procedures and timely funding are put in place to keep the register current.”
Meanwhile, rolling out National Identity (NID) card registrations to rural communities in the provinces and districts remains a huge and complex challenge, acting provincial registrar of the Central province Edward Kila says.
Kila, also the deputy provincial administrator for Central, was speaking at the workshop.
“The challenges are huge and complex because to conduct registrations in places that do not have road networks, you need to fly,” he said.
“The other issue is that the registration needs electricity. Where there is no power supply, you cannot conduct the registrations.”