By JOE GURINA
Governor General Sir Bob Dadae has received the writs for the Bougainville regional by-election from acting Electoral Commissioner Simon Sinai.
The acting Electoral Commissioner returned the writs to the Governor General at Government House this morning after the successful completion of the by-election which saw Peter Lemay Tsiamalili Jr duly elected as regional member for Bougainville.
Mr Tsiamalili was duly elected Member on February 7th, after reaching the absolute majority with 37, 534 votes. Tsiamalili fills the gap left vacant by Joe Lera who resigned to contest the Bougainville presidential elections.
The Bougainville regional by-election commenced with nominations on December 3rd, 2020 whilst polling began in January and concluded with Tsiamalili’s declaration on February 7.
Sinai said the national government allocated K8million to conduct the by election from the promised K15million allocation.
However, Sinai said the Electoral Commission is satisfied with the outcome of the by-elections.
“We have conducted the elections as early as possible and within time to return the Writs earlier before the scheduled February 19th,’’ he said.
He said 79 percent of the total population of over 200, 000 turned out to cast their votes.
Sinai said Bougainville was not an easy task to run the elections in terms of its geographical locations.
He said South Bougainville was quite difficult, “we needed logistic arrangements to get back further into Bana and Torokina areas, parts of Siwai at the back of the Panguna Copper mine.”
“In the Northern region, you would expect to see the atolls making up the 14 constituencies and that is only reached by doubled powered motors but more effectively and efficiently catered by ships through these waters. So in this election, we hired ships from out of Lae to service these parts.”
He said the outstanding monies of the K15 million will be used to settled logistics that they have hired.
Sinai said the Electoral Commission gave the opportunity to the Office of Bougainville Electoral Commission supervise and run the elections.
He thanked the national government for funding the successful completion of the by-election.