Electoral process should be reviewed, says Tukana

Sole Fintech Fiji founder and chairman Semi Tukana has called for all doubts surrounding Fiji’s electoral process to be removed before the next General Election.

Mr Tukana, in a recent social media post that gained significant traction, questioned several systems used by the Fijian Elections Office (FEO) to conduct elections.

He raised concerns about the Births, Deaths and Marriages (BDM) system, the electoral roll and the immigration system, while also warning against the use of the National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA) software.

He also recommended that the FEO allow voters the flexibility to cast their ballots at any polling station and return to manual vote counting using a chalkboard and Microsoft Excel.

“The previous two elections in 2018 and 2022 have given rise to a high level of distrust amongst our population in regard to the system that was used, which I believe is the NADRA system from Pakistan.

“You will recall that in both elections, the system crashed. The then Supervisor of Elections (SOE) watered it down by giving it a term like a ‘glitch’. It is very rare for a system which has claimed to have been used by more populous nations than ours to crash,” he said.

A fact-checking report by the Australian Association Press in 2022 showed that the NADRA software helped calculate the total number of election items such as pens and envelopes required based on the polling station voter numbers, scan forms from political parties into digital records and also tracked the movement of election materials throughout the country.

Mohammed Saneem who was SOE at the time said the software did not deal with results, voting or counting, adding that claims of the involvement of any third party was false.

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