Registrar looks to adopt new voting system

 PAPUA New Guinea needs a voting system that will promote political parties’ policies that are centred on development, Registrar of Political Parties Dr Alphonse Gelu says.

He said money had played a major part in PNG politics and impacted on the people’s choices of candidates during general elections. 

“But that particular culture we can always address it by coming up with a new voting system and that new system will solve our problem,” Gelu said. 

“They do it in America, Australia, England and New Zealand, these are matured democracies, they are well ahead of us in terms of how they practice the system of democracy. But if people of this country think that they can play around the system and continue to vote people because they come and give you K10 or whatever, we can easily change the voting system.”

Gelu said there were voting systems that could be designed or adopted. 

He used the voting system is Fiji as an example where voters had the choice of voting above or below the line on the ballot paper.

He said on the ballot paper above the line were the names of candidates, including their pictures, and below were the names of parties. 

“If you don’t like the candidates, don’t worry about voting them, vote for the parties. In counting, the number of votes will go to the party. 

“In PNG, right now we don’t really care about the total number of votes in elections, the only thing we care about is the number of seats.”