The Timorese president will demand an international audit to investigate whether the results of Sunday’s parliamentary elections have not been announced, the head of state told Lusa on Monday.
José Ramos-Horta also accused the government of biasing the Technical Secretariat for Electoral Administration (STAE) over the past two years and withdrawing people with experience and capacity from the targeted entity due to failures in the dissemination of results .
“I don’t understand why, we are already on the second day and there is no permanent update of the table, it is not done. STAE presents the deceptive excuse that the problem is the Internet, [mas] it’s not an internet problem,” the head of state said after meeting with the chairman of East Timor’s National Electoral Commission (CNE).
“The problem is that in the course of these two years STAE has become a partisan, removing all staff with years of experience, which has been praised by everyone who worked in Guinea-Bissau, São Tomé and Príncipe and the Central African Republic . and put people who are politicians”he accused.
As a matter of “transparency”, Ramos-Horta wants an explanation, which he understands can only be guaranteed by an international audit: “I will demand an audit first, [uma] thorough audit. And it won’t be a national audit. It will be an international audit, with competent people, with criminal investigation capacity to see what happened,” he promised.
STAE admitted some flaws, due to technical and internet issues, delaying the publication of results.
The general manager, Acilino Manuel Branco, told Lusa that there have been problems with internet communication from municipalities to Dili so that the table of results can be inserted.
Nearly 19 hours after polling stations closed on Sunday, STAE had still only released data corresponding to about 48% of polling stations, equivalent to approximately 258 thousand voters, in a universe of more than 890 thousand registered voters.
The only way to find out about the progressive counting of the result is to visit STAE itself, in Dili, and consult two televisions available on site or, alternatively, follow the counting chart, which is rebroadcast by Radio Televiso de Timor-Leste (RTTL).
However, the signal to RTTL is not always real time and there is a significant delay at various times. There is no ‘online’ site for consultation, and STAE opted this year, in contrast to what it did in previous elections, to publish only the data of the national census, without the tables with the censuses in the municipalities and to publish in the diaspora. , although they are already closed in some places.
Data from that vote in the municipalities appears in a long footer on the screens, and it is not possible to know the votes for each party, nor other data about the vote, such as participation, which only indicates the percentages that the political forces are obtained.
Despite the flaws in the count, STAE was praised, including by José Ramos-Horta himself, for the electoral work done on the ground, with more than 20,000 people deployed across the country.
Source: DN
