The Fijian Elections Office has recorded a total of 33,665 engagements in its ad hoc voter registration drive resulting from changes in the law.
According to a statement by the Supervisor of Elections Mohammed Saneem, the registration drive started on October 4, 2021 and it has seen 6,139 new registrations for the 2022 General Election.
“When we started on 4 October, we had 5 teams in Suva VSC, 3 in Navua, 3 in Sigatoka, 2 in Lautoka and 2 in Labasa. Seeing the intense turnout from that day, the FEO had to very quickly, I must say, train and deploy additional staff and equipment to serve our voters by 12 October, the number of teams were vamped up to 27 teams in Suva, 24 teams in Nakasi, 17 in Nausori, 8 in Navua, 20 in Nadi, 9 in Lautoka, 3 in Ba, 3 in Rakiraki and 3 in Labasa. From 5 registration venues we upped the number of venues to 14 to cater for the high turnout,” stated FEO.
“On 14th October our Nakasi VSC recorded 1,456 customers. By then we had already prepared the VSCs to receive high density of customers and if you look at our FB page, the Nakasi VSC looked pretty empty.”
