The Fijian Elections Office had efficient checks in place to detect and eliminate duplicates in the voter register.

This was a finding of the Multinational Observer Group which observed the 2018 general elections.

Its findings will rest theories that more people were registered to vote when compared to the country’s population.

This misinformation was rife in Opposition camps in the lead up to the 2018 General Election.

MOG’s finding:

“MOG observed that the Register published in October 2018 became controversial when it appeared to contradict the results of Fiji’s 2017 census.

The Register reported a population of voters higher than the equivalent number of voting age people reported in the census.

“The MOG spoke to a range of Fijian agencies… The FEO collected its data continuously over four years and the census comprised data collected on a single day (and collected with a range of questions designed for multiple purposes).

The Fiji Bureau of Statistics advised the MOG that while the methodologies and data sets used by the Bureau and the FEO were different, they had confidence in the rigour and thoroughness of both the census and voter registration.”

The group also found against a common rhetoric that people should be allowed to vote anywhere, saying that this would greatly increase the cost of elections and open the risk of multiple votes cast by a single voter.

Edited by Jonathan Bryce