Electoral Commissioner optimistic the census will not affect LLG election schedule

The Electoral Commissioner says Papua New Guinea Electoral Commission is aware of the mammoth task of conducting a Local Level Government election using two voting methods.

Simon Sinai says while considering that, the PNGEC is hosting a weeklong workshop to come up with an election plan to ensure its manageable

Relevant stakeholders like the Royal Papua New Guinea Constabulary, observers like the Australian Electoral Commission are also part of the workshop.

"We have been on the ground doing work starting last year in terms of doing verification on the electoral roll and start updating voters in all the electorates throughout the country.

"Now this workshop is to draw people from the country, election managers to headquarters to finalise the election workshop learning and election activities in the province.

"The workshop will now find out as to the status of the election preparations in each of the provinces especially with the verification of voters and the logistic arrangements", Mr Sinai said.

The weeklong workshop started today and will end on Friday in preparation for the LLG election on 25th of July.

The Papua New Guinea Electoral Commission is optimistic that the National Census will not affect the Local Level Government Election's schedule.

Commissioner Sinai told this newsroom that despite the slow start in the conduct of National Census, they have made room for this, if in the event that the National Census is prolonged.

"We have discussed over that and census, we are expected to complete in June and I am sure they are going to do that and if it goes over, it won't go very much further to the end of July.

"That's why we calculated the timing, and we did two by-elections at the earlier stage to allow census to happen in June and on July 25th we issued the writs.

"Around the first two weeks of July can be used by census but in terms of elections, yes there are people getting confused over the census and elections.

"Census is about counting people and elections is about specific people, those that are already on the roll, we're doing verification only and start listing people who have missed out in the voting in the last past elections.

We are very careful about that and mindful to see the best way forward to help all of us with the two major activities going on," Mr Sinai said.