Aspect of yesterday’s meeting
The Electoral Affairs Commission for the Legislative Assembly Election (CAEAL) confirmed that as of yesterday, it has approved five applications for legal status as submitted by respective nomination committees.
Speaking to reporters after the Commission meeting, Commission chairman Tong Hio Fong said a total of eight applications for legal status of nomination of committees have been submitted. Additional documentation is required for the three pending applications, he added.
Applications for the 2017 election nomination committees will close on June 20. The election will be held on September 17. A nomination committee must contain at least 300 , but no more than 500 voters. Voter names can be drawn only from the official list of natural person voters.
Tong said the CAEAL has so far identified 14 cases of an individual signing nomination papers for more than one nomination committee. The Secretariat of the Commission has since met with seven of the 14 to gain a better understanding of the reason for their duplicated signatures, and will meet with the remaining seven in the near future.
According to Tong, the Commission intends to conduct a more comprehensive analysis of the issue once the nomination committee formation phase had been concluded. The CAEAL has stepped up efforts in educating voters that they are only entitled to endorse a single nomination committee, he added.
The controversy surrounding the multiple nominations was sparked last month when the CAEAL found two instances of individuals signing the nomination papers of more than one nomination committee and forwarded the cases to the police. It later surfaced that the case was partly a result of disparate translations of the Electoral Law in Chinese and Portuguese.
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