TIKO CONTENT, HAWEA QUESTIONS APP CAPABILITY
Minority party, New Generation Party leader, Varinava Tiko, said his party had done its best concluding that it was content with the results.
Mr Tiko’s party contested the 2022 General Election with five candidates.
He reckoned that results showed that the silent majority of iTaukeis voted for FijiFirst, he said.
“I’ll be interested to know the youth turnout, but I can see that members of IndoFijian community are the main people determined to change government. This is my assessment.”
On the other hand, We Unite Fiji deputy party leader, Dr Jone Hawea, questioned the capability of the Fijian Elections Office (FEO) app after a glitch causing the app to be temporarily out of service for a couple of hours late night on Wednesday through the early hours of Thursday.
The party contested the Election with 20 candidates.
He claimed that when they monitored the numbers it did not make sense.
“But calculating from the total votes seen in the provisional results, it surpassed 51 per cent and there were 690 polling stations where results were yet to be counted,” he said.
51 per cent of the total registered voters cast their vote, meaning that 315,000 voted as at 6pm on Wednesday. This is against the total registered voters which was 693,915.
“For an app that is set up to count the national election and assurances were made prior to date by the Fijian Elections Office that this app is ready and it will ensure that votes are counted well to make a mistake of 15,000 votes, is reflective of an app or software that is mucked up, that is easily tampered with.”
He claimed that the FEO app could not be trusted. “Therefore, this calls for manual count even if it means we will have to do it over a fortnight. It has to be done that way. The people deserve their rights to vote to be counted. It’s one person one vote, so each vote needs to be counted as such, and not allow a computer that has made a significant mistake,” he said.
(Read our Front Page today to see Supervisor of Elections, Mohammed Saneem’s explanation on the glitch).