Fiji Sodelpa pushes youth voter registration
A political party in Fiji plans to start transporting young people to voter registration centres to boost youth enrolment for the elections.
Transcript
A political party in Fiji plans to start transporting young people to voter registration centres to boost youth enrolment for the elections.
The president of Sodelpa's Youth Council, Pita Waqavonovono, says it's discovered many young people have not yet registered to vote in the polls promised by September this year.
He says more than sixty percent of the population is estimated to be in the 18 to 35 age bracket so the young vote is important for those contesting the polls.
Mr Waqavonovono told Sally Round the party's finding it hard to get the figures it needs.
Pita Waqavonovono: We have not been given any statistics from the current regime on how many young people have registered. Through a survey we are currently doing with young people within the Sodelpa party, we're beginning to find there's a lot of young people who are eligible to vote who are part of Sodelpa but they have not registered to vote as yet, so what the party is doing is we are paying for transport to get many of our supporters to the registration offices so that young people can register. That's the biggest issue we have at the moment, the fact that the information is there but we haven't been provided the proper statistics and also we've been asking for an electronic version of the electoral roll. We've been given all these huge books to look through which has all the voters names but it does not have their ages.
Sally Round: Why is it that young people are not registering? Have you asked them that?
PW: A lot of young people are trying to suss out whether the system is flawed or not ... whether the elections will be free and fair and we've just been trying to spread the message of optimism about the whole election process. Apart from that you've got a lot of young people who are isolated from the whole elections registration process. We've got a lot of young people who live in rural areas and we've been asking the registration team, maybe it would be a good idea for them to go house to house and conduct registrations that way because there's a lot of young people who do not have the resources or the means to catch a bus or catch a cab and come down to the towns and cities to register. We're running out of time. The Election Commission and the registration team, the government should be churning out a lot of civic education matters and information but instead they're concentrating on campaigning. They should be using state resources to spread civic educational material and also talk to people about the importance of this election instead of trying to secure the tenure of the current regime.
SR: But surely it would be in their interest to get the youth vote as well, and so make sure those young people are registering.
PW: One of the reasons also why they are probably not going to register as many young people is because they are not popular amongst young people anyway. So that's one of the reasons why we've decided to actually start paying for young people to make their way down to towns. We're paying for buses to pick up young people and actually get them registered. This is the route that we now have to follow because we know for sure that this particular regime is unpopular amongst young people. I mean they've suppressed the youth of this nation so many times, with the human rights violations and all those issues. It's still fresh in our young minds.
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