Most petitions filed by urban centres, says chief magistrate

National

By GIDEON KINDIWA
LOCAL level government wards located in urban centres are the ones filing election petitions and not wards in rural centres, says a senior court official.
Chief Magistrate Mark Pupaka spoke to The National during a magistrates’ workshop on LLG election petitions in Port Moresby.
He said so far, wards located in or around urban centres had been filing election petitions while none were coming from rural LLGs.
“This is probably because most of the candidates in urban LLGs are aware of the law and have means to pursue their grievances legally,” he said.
Pupaka said he could not give specific statistics but from his experience as a senior court magistrate, he had seen many LLG election petitions from urban wards.
He said elections happened every five years and petitions were not ordinary cases that magistrates and judges dealt with.
“That’s why we are conducting this workshop to again teach and build the necessary skills required by our magistrates to deal with election petitions that may rise after this LLG election,” Pupaka said.
Pupaka said the training covered skills in dealing with errors and omissions on the part of the Electoral Commission, the counting process, casting of votes process, declaration process, misconduct by candidates, and the conduct of scrutineers and voters that might change the outcome of elections.
The two main areas to consider in election petitions as pointed out by Pupaka were:

  • Mandatory requirements of the law; and,
  • Substantive hearing as to what went wrong.

“We are mostly focused on getting the elections petitions right as it is neatly prescribed.
“For instance, what a petition must look like, who has to sign it, where it must be filed and the timeline of 40 days. Those are mandatory requirements of the law.
“If a petition passes the test of mandatory requirements it will then go through a substantive hearing to determine what went wrong in order to give a ruling on what has to be done to correct it,” he said.