Draw today for election teams’ airtime on TV

The Electoral Affairs Commission for the Legislative Assembly Election is conducting a draw today to determine the order in which candidate teams will be able to use television and radio airtime on local news broadcaster TDM for the purposes of campaigning.

The commission will also conduct a draw to determine the order in which teams will be allowed to use the designated public venues for their respective promotional activities.

An executive order was published in the Official Gazette on Monday specifying the rules for airing election publicity on television and radio channels operated by TDM.

The executive order states that each election team will have a total of 12 airtime slots on TDM’s Chinese-language television channel, in which the first 11 slots will last two minutes and the final slot will be one minute. For the Portuguese-language television channel, there will be eight slots for each team, where the first seven sessions will also last two minutes and the final slot will last one minute.  

As for radio channels, there will be a total of 33 one-minute airtime slots per election team for the Chinese-language radio and 21 one-minute slots for the Portuguese-language radio.

According to the executive order, the final airtime slots for both television and radio channels will be broadcasted on September 15, the last day of the two-week campaign period.

There are 25 teams with a total of 192 candidates contesting for the direct election for the Legislative Assembly and six teams with 15 candidates contesting for the indirect election.  The election will be held on September 17.