Statement by Electoral Commissioner

Mr Mukesh Nand

Know Your Election[KYE] Awareness Campaign for 2022 General Election

8 March 2022

Ladies and Gentlemen.

Ni sa Bula Vinaka and a very warm welcome to you all here today.

It is indeed a great honor and pleasure for me to visit you here in the beautiful island of Ovalau. This also happens to be my first official visit to a voter registration and awareness venue since the 2022 General Election Nationwide Voter Registration and Education drive began.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the current program is essential for the next general election. We want every eligible person to be able to register if they haven’t yet and we also want every Fijian voter to have the most latest VoterCard.

Registration is the first step towards the guarantee that you can vote in the next general election. In Fiji, you can only vote in the polling station in which you name is in the voter list. This means that when you register or upgrade your card today, check the name of the Polling Venue very carefully on your VoterCard.

I am in full agreement with the 2018 Electoral Commission when they recommended to upgrade the VoterCard to include the Polling venue details on it. This is simply because in our electoral system, you must know your polling venue in-order to vote. This is an important piece of information that one would expect on their VoterCard – which is now directly printed on the card .

For any election, Voters are our most important stakeholders as they hold the key on Election Day when they exercise their right to vote. Voters need to be educated about the electoral process to help them become an informed voter.

I hope that the awareness session that the Supervisor of Elections will conduct next will provide you with essential information that will help you to better understand the electoral system. We believe that the more information you have on the electoral process, the greater your sense of ownership will be. Ultimately, the electoral process is for the ordinary voter.

Thank you for having me here and I hand over to the Supervisor of Elections.

Vinaka