“The universal expectation when it comes to elections is the paramount pillar of an election, that is fair, free and credible and the right to secrecy of the ballot paper,” says Supervisor of Elections, Mohammed Saneem.

He was posed a question by a University of the South Pacific (USP) Student Alumni, Josh Tuisawau during a Talanoa session on Thursday on the topic Your Vote Matters.

Mr Tuisawau asked Mr Saneem if the ballot paper for this year’s general election would be numbered as the ballot papers in the 2014 and 2018 General Elections.

“I teach accounting and what we teach to students is that documents must have numbers, especially when you talk about the activity as such, a receipt, an invoice that you use has a number and why is such an important document like a ballot paper not contain a number,” he said.

Mr Saneen said the principle of an election was that one person, has the right to defer to the entire group, and the person can do so by exercising their right of freedom of expression through the ballot paper.

“So it works against the accounting principal” he said.

“Fiji has never had numbers on ballot papers that were issued to the public, but on the stub of the ballot papers that remain in the booklets but the ballot paper torn and given to the public has never had the number on it.”

He said the right to secrecy of the ballot means once a voter has marked the ballot paper and been brought to the ballot box, nobody should know or be able to trace who marked the ballot paper and that is the law.

Faith Grace from SODELPA who was part of the session said we don’t need serial numbers on ballot papers, because of the protocol of results that are posted up on the polling station and it clearly states the number of votes that have been cast.

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