K15mil to hold LLG elections

By REBECCA KUKU
WRITS for the Madang, Maprik and Dei open supplementary elections will be issued next month, says electoral commissioner Simon Sinai.
Sinai said that tentative dates had been set for the supplementary elections for the three districts, and would be announced soon.
“We have the local level government (LLG) elections next year so we want to get all this done this year,” he said.
Sinai said the supplementary elections would cost K15 million to be completed.
“The cost for running a supplementary election is between K3 million and K5 million so, we are looking at K15 million to conduct elections for these three districts,”he said.
He said the total cost of running the Wewak, North Bougainville and Laigap open elections was K14 million. “So we will use the same model of counting that was done for the recently concluded supplementary election for Wewak, to ensure that the Madang Open, Maprik Open and Dei Open supplementary elections are done this year,” he said.
Meanwhile, Sinai said from the 102 election petitions, 70 had been completed.
He thanked the courts and the lawyers for their promptness in clearing the cases.
“We don’t want election petitions from the 2022 General Election (GE22) to drag on all the way through into the next set of election.
“So hopefully, all the election petitions will be completed by early next year.
“From the 70 completed cases, only one was successful, the election petition for Kabwum, under special circumstances, but we are still waiting for the court’s final decision and orders,” he said.