SODELPA Quashes Ballot Stuffing Claims
Social Democratic Liberal Party (SODELPA) general secretary, Lenaitasi Duru, has rubbished claims made by Indian YouTubers that Pakistan based company NADRA ‘stuffed ballot boxes” in 2018 general elections. SODELPA which had party agents at every polling venue and count centre said: “every ballot box in the last election that moved was sealed; this was one of the security measures that were in place.
“The officer at the next destination checks, the first thing that they checked was whether the seal was still intact or broken. If it was broken then it should have been reported.
“You cannot stuff extra ballot paper into its box. There’s a tally done at the polling station than it’s also done at the national count center. If it does not match then it should’ve raised a lot of questions.
“All political parties have polling agents to verify the vote counts. This type of allegation for me is farfetched. I have been attending various workshops organised by the Supervisor of Elections, we feel assured that even in 2018, system and processes were good.
“That’s what I’ve been telling people to stop making baseless allegations because they have no evidence. I’ve given instructions to our campaign team to not talk about rigging in 2018 unless they have hard evidence. Otherwise we are just wasting time that didn’t happen.”
“But that is gone, our focus right now is 2022. We are satisfied with what Mr Mohammed Saneem has been showing us with the electoral processes. Our job in this coming election is to ensure that our polling agents are there and the electoral process is carried out to the latter.
“I do not know why people keep on bringing NADRA up, they have nothing to do with our elections. I think it was deliberately released in 2016 or 2017 that they were coming in to defeat our people mentally so they do not come for elections. I do not know what their function is in this year’s election and I have not heard anything.
“The election management system that is in place is from DATEC that programme is just to tally, it does not do any counting.”
The Multinational Observer Group which was co-led by India, Australia and Indonesia had found the 2018 General Election to be credible.
They did not highlight any instances where more ballot papers were found in ballot boxes.
His message to Indian YouTubers:
“Come forward with evidence because all these allegations are just discouraging our people not to come and vote in the upcoming election. This is the kind of message that we do not want right now. We want the people to be confident that this election will be free, fair and transparent. Give them the confidence to come in and vote. “This type of allegation affected our 2018 turnout. A lot of our people were affected psychologically by this NADRA theory. There was no proof and our people were inclined to believe in conspiracy theory. That was intentional on some people’s part to leak the NADRA affairs overseas. When that was leaked and made public it affected the people’s confidence in the electoral system.”