Polls close in the Marshall Islands

Transcript

Polls have closed in the Marshall Islands' elections, but it will be two weeks until results are known because of the high number of offshore postal votes.

Our correspondent in Majuro, Giff Johnson, says there was a large turnout at the polls on Monday, with queues leading out the door at many stations.

He says there has been tight competition for the seats in the 33-member legislature, with foreign minister Tony de Brum facing a particularly tough battle for re-election in Kwajalein.

But he told Jamie Tahana the fact that many people vote along family lines, and the huge and influential proportion of offshore votes means results are far from certain.

GIFF JOHNSON: The Marshall Islands national election got going with pretty heavy voter turnout in most polling locations. I went around to many of them to see how it was going and it was very organised, things were running smoothly, lots of lines, people here know they're going to have to stand in line for a while to cast their votes.

JAMIE TAHANA: Who's running? What sort of competition is going on here?

GJ: In the Marshall Islands there really are no very organised political parties and the campaign this year in particular was fairly low-key in the lead up in terms of what people in say, New Zealand or other big countries might expect. But there seems to be a pretty clear feeling from a lot of people I talk to just that they want some change, they're not really satisfied with the things that are going on mainly to do with just government services. I think people see that things have declined, there's been this ongoing out-migration to the US because people don't see job opportunities, education and healthcare opportunities here so they're migrating to the US. How that will influence today's vote is really hard to say because one of the things about voting in the Marshall Islands, as in a lot of small islands in the Pacific, [is that] historically it's gone alone family lines - people vote for their relatives no matter what. So the question is given that there is some younger people running and trying to break in on incumbents, whether some of these younger folks who've worked very hard will be successful in actually mobilising across family lines. But I'd say the big races are really at Majuro and Kwajalein, those are the two urban centres that have about 25 percent of the seats in the parliament and Kwajalein, sort of the key figure who's on the spot, incumbent foreign minister Tony de Brum, the Marshall Islands climate advocate, he's facing a very tough re-election bid at Kwajalein with two strong challengers for the two available seats.   

JT: And how will it work with forming a government?

GJ: The Marshall Islands, for the last couple of elections, has had coalition governments, and there clearly won't be any clear majority group emerging in the parliament, more likely it will be several different factions. The way the convoluted voting system works here, while we will have unofficial domestic results probably by the end of this week we have to wait two weeks before they can count the postal absentee votes from the United States, and since that's a large number it could change many of the outcomes from the domestic vote and we won't know that until the beginning of December.