Wewak MP Simatab ousted

National, Normal
Source:

By JACOB POK

THE election of Jim Simatab as Wewak MP has been declared null and void.
The Waigani Supreme Court yesterday ordered a recount to start in Wewak within 21 days from yesterday.
A three-judge Supreme Court bench of Deputy Chief Justice Gibbs Salika and justices Ambeng Kandakasi and Derek Hartshorn yesterday ruled in favour of petitioner Moses Manwau for a recount.
The National Court had earlier on ruled against Manwau’s arguments, forcing the plaintiff to seek redress in the higher court.
Manwau had challenged the 2007 win of Simatab, citing the tampering of ballot box number 0389 where both the inner and outer seals were broken.
He argued that the East Sepik election steering committee had set aside the disputed box but the returning officer had gone ahead and included it for counting.
Simatab’s witnesses countered that the seals were broken due to poor road conditions and rough handling of the ballot box.
The Supreme Court yesterday ruled that the broken seals did raise a question as to the integrity of the ballot box.
The court found that the trial judge was left with no satisfactory explanation for the broken inner and outer seals of the relevant ballot box. The court also found that the trial judge, in his ruling, accepted the evidence of a witness who had no on-the-ground experience of transporting ballot boxes or placing and removing inner and outer seals on a ballot box.
Therefore, the Supreme Court established that Simatab’s witnesses lacked primary facts.
“If the ballot box were transported through rough terrain, or by rough handling, how was it that only one ballot box (0389) had its seals broken and none of the others?” the court asked. 
The court also found that the returning officer disobeyed the instruction of the steering committee by including the disputed box in the counting.
There was no explanation from the returning officer as to why he did that.
The court, therefore, ordered a recount to be supervised by the registrar of the National and Supreme courts.
The court also ordered that ballot box number 0389 shall not be included in the recount and the result of the recount shall return to the court for it to declare the ultimate winner of the election.