KELA KAPKORA SIL BOLKIN

IT WAS THE MORNING of Wednesday 27 June 2012. The plebs living in Morata chewed their betelnut, lit their cigars and discussed the polls.

It was not a secret ballot to them. Each individual spat out the name of the candidate they would vote for as they walked towards the polling booth.

My family and I also walked to the nearest polling booth at Morata II on that Wednesday morning joining the queue. After we fronted up at the polling booth, an official told us that surnames starting with letters A-F would have to move to another section of the settlement to vote. That included ‘Bolkin’.

The electoral commission had not informed the public that polling would be conducted according to alphabetical order, nor that polling venues would be allocated to specific sections of the alphabet.

It was a new arrangement and unfortunately was not communicated properly to the plebs. The result was simple - more chaos.

The polling booth nearest to our home was for surnames starting with P to Z. The polling booth starting with A-F was further away and, worse still, swarming with aliens from the Port Moresby North East electorate.

Then came the bombshell. A woman entered the polling booth with all her finger nails coloured cherry red, fingernails fresh and obviously polished a few minutes ago.

A policeman had a good look at the small man of her left finger and nodded his head to his colleague at the rear of the woman. Without the woman realizing her fate, the policeman at her rear swung a fan belt with might, jolting both her fat legs.

The woman growled, and pissed in front of the polling booth. He legs were too weak to prop her up from the impact. She collapsed like an old tree.

The policeman kept thrashing her with the fanbelt. She saw no end to the belting. She had no choice but to cope before staggering off with yells and tears. In a split second the queue was reduced by two-thirds.

So two-thirds of the people were there to double or triple vote, only to be scared off by the poor woman’s belting.

We voted in the last two elections in that polling place nearest our home. But this time we had to travel far to look for the polling place that has names starting with ‘A to F’.

Eventually we found ourselevs in the midst of a rowdy crowd - and armoured vehicles with fully armed disciplined forces like you might see in Baghdad or Cairo.

The plebs as well as the disciplined forces behaved as if they all had left their heads at home before coming to the polling booth. Fear and chaos reigned.

Anyway, my wife and I feared this tense situation and returned home without voting.

Many similar scenes have been reported throughout the country and many eligible voters did not vote due to fear as well as their names being missing from the  common roll.

The PNG Electoral Commission and the stakeholders involved in the 2012 national election should convene, evaluate and redesign the electoral system for 2017 as soon as possible.

The Electoral Commission must not wait until the eleventh hour. The flop of the 2012 national election boils down to eleventh hour planning and the constant verbal diarrhoea from the Commission office.

Let’s hope the Electoral Commission gets it right come 2017.