Four political parties claim that the glitch situation experienced with the Fijian Elections Office’s Results App on the night of Election Day also occurred in the Fijian General Elections of 2014 and 2018.
At a joint press conference with National Federation Party leader Professor Biman Prasad, Fiji Labour Party leader Mahendra Chaudhry and Unity Fiji Party leader Savenaca Narube at the Victoria Palms Hotel in Suva this afternoon, The People’s Alliance Party leader Sitiveni Rabuka said the explanation of the error explained by Supervisor of Elections Mohammed Saneem was “inadequate and unacceptable”.
“In 2014, a SODELPA candidate got about 5000 votes and was downgraded shortly after,” Mr Rabuka said.
“Similarly in 2018, a FijiFirst candidate had unusually high numbers yet the FEO never felt the need to disclose a publicly-funded KPMG forensic audit of the IT system as repeatedly requested by opposition political parties,” he added.
Mr Rabuka said the leaders had posed the following pertinent questions to the FEO:
- How can a taxpayer-funded system allow this serious error to occur?
- Where did the 15,000 votes of the leading candidate come from? The leaders pointed out the abrupt stop of the announcement of provisional stats results after the second update at 10.15pm when an opposition party candidate was leading the count with approximately 15,000 votes and was later reduced to 63.
- Who benefitted from the re-distributed votes after the correction?
