Minister for National Planning Richard Maru is pleased with the assurance of support from the Chief Election Commissioner of India, Sunil Arora, to assist Papua New Guinea in electoral training and technologies ahead of the 2022 National General Election.
The PNG Government wants technology transfer to move from manual voting and counting to electronic voting and counting in the 2022 National Elections.
Both men met today (Tuesday, 26 March 2019) in New Delhi where Minister Maru expressed PNG Government’s keenness to replicate what India has in terms of use of technology, systems, and processes in the conduct of its national elections.
The Election Commission of India (ECI) manages a massive voter population of over 850 million voters. With the use of innovative technologies such as the Electronic Voting Machines (EVM), India goes to the polls and impressively has its election results delivered within 2-3 days.
This is the type of technology, system and process PNG is looking for, given the track record of millions of Kina spent on conducting elections in PNG, the complaints of missing ballot papers and countless cases presented before the Court of Disputed Returns.
This visit to India’s Election Commission follows an initial meeting in December of 2017 between PNG’s Electoral Commissioner, Patilias Gamato and the then Chief Election Commissioner of India, Shri A.K. Joti. India has signed MoU’s with 25 other countries assisting them to conduct their elections. The most recent successful outcome of this partnership was that of Namibia where the elections were conducted without any issues.
Chief Election Commissioner Arora said India is ready and able to assist PNG. ECI operates an electoral training institute, Indian Institute of Democracy and Election
Management, which PNGEC can utilize by either sending technical expertise to PNG or PNGEC sending officers to India for training.
ECI has given a draft MoU to Minister Maru for a way forward. The way forward is to have an MoU in place between PNGEC and ECI to address the electoral issues and improve the delivery of election services in PNG.
Source: Ministry of National Planning Media Release
