Polls for the largest Timorese parliaments in history have closed in Timor-Leste, South Korea and Australia, at the same time that, due to the time difference, voting begins in Europe.
Voting in Australia was the first to close, at 3:00 p.m. local time (6:00 a.m. in Lisbon), followed by those in South Korea and Timor-Leste, with voters remaining, at the scheduled closing time, since Queue to vote.
For the three polling stations in Australia, the results of which will be the first to be known, the turnout rate was 43.22%, with 969 of the 1,442 registered voters voting.
In Melbourne, 623 voters voted, with 173 voters each in central Sydney and Darwin.
In the case of Melbourne, many of the voters remained, later, in the room, after the counting of the votes, showing the ballot papers, one by one, to those present.
There is still no participation data for either South Korea or Timor-Leste, where the complex counting process is now beginning.
Shortly before the end, the general director of the Technical Secretariat for Electoral Management (STAE), Acilino Manuel Branco, told Lusa that there were no records of serious incidents and that the trip proceeded normally.
“From the morning until now, all the polling stations in the national territory are working well, they opened on time. I went through countless centers in Dili and saw, in many of them, huge queues of voters participating,” she told Lusa.
“My expectation is a high turnout,” he explained.
Among other aspects, Acilino Manuel Branco referred to some voting centers where the agents of a political party wanted to enter the voting space at the same time, generally in school classrooms.
The first rumor of the day, he pointed out, were alleged complaints about the indelible purple ink that is used to mark the fingers of voters, and that, as happened in the 2022 presidential elections, was acquired with the support of the United Nations Program United for Development.
Manuel Branco said that he did not find any basis for the rumor, that he already had the right to photos on social networks.
There are 17 parties contesting today’s elections in Timor-Leste, the count of which could take several days. More than 890,000 voters are registered for the vote, in which the 65 deputies of the National Parliament will be elected.
Eight of the parties have a parliamentary seat and one makes its debut, and to elect deputies the political forces must obtain more than 4% of the valid votes.
Election day will have the largest number of voters in the country and in the diaspora, and the largest number of polling stations.
Thousands of observers from Timor-Leste and several countries and hundreds of journalists were accredited to follow the vote.
Source: TSF
