The final Electoral Roll for the 2017 National General Elections will be completed next month.
Electoral Commissioner Patilias Gamato says he is expecting the final Electoral Roll to be completed and printed by the end of March 2017.
“I should expect all provinces to complete their field work by mid-December or before Christmas Day.
“The month of January should be used only for any flow-over but only for those big provinces. February should be the month for roll display and objections.”
Gamato said the roll update exercise is a crucial part of the electoral process is currently going on in all the provinces where new electors, provisional, deceased, ghost and underage are flagged for removal.
He said after field work in gathering elector data is completed, the data captured on the Claim for Enrolment Form (Form 11) will be returned to the provincial headquarters at the data processing centre for data entry.
He said PNGEC’s ICT team has completed training of six personnel and they are expected to travel to provinces in the coming weeks to start setting up computer systems for data processing.
“As Election Managers and Assistant Election Managers, you must closely monitor these activities and get directly involved and ensure that the data entry process is progressing well and properly,” Gamato said.
He made the call following issues and discrepancies that were picked up during the data entry process for the three enrolment pilot projects in Alotau, Rigo and Kokopo.
Meanwhile, the Electoral Commissioner has instructed his deputy in charge of election administration Simon Sinai, with the support of technical advisors from the International Federation of Election Systems (IFES) and the Australian Electoral Commission, to start work on the Roll Objection Process.
“I want to see that those provinces that complete their data processing early must publish their rolls and display them for objections.
“I want the objection period to be shorter. The objection period can be one month, but if the issues are genuine and can be fixed within a week or less period,” Gamato said.