By Mere Naleba, Fiji Times – 28 August 2014

THE Fijian Elections Office is anticipating to print about 715,000 ballot papers for use in the one-day general election on September 17.

Supervisor of Elections Mohammed Saneem said the reason behind the huge number was because the ballot papers would be bound in a book of 50 ballot papers per booklet.

Printing of the ballot papers started on Tuesday and was expected to end yesterday.

He said the amount awarded to Star Printery Ltd would not be disclosed as it was still confidential because work was still being carried out.

“The printing is going ahead of schedule where we anticipate having the first batch of postal votes ballot papers as early as tomorrow (today) and we will put them in the envelopes and sending them away via DHL,” he said.

“Today’s program was such that we had the observers first, then we had the political parties come and tour the facility and witness the process and the last bit is the media.”

The ballot paper will contain an orange strip across the top of the ballot paper which Mr Saneem says is the perforation line and is also a security feature.

“As you can understand today is the close of postal vote at 6pm and once we have received all the postal votes application entered into the system, then we will have an idea as to what’s the number of postal voters and how many are actually in the pre poll.” Mr Saneem said.

He confirmed the distribution of ballot papers for pre-polling voting would depend on the number of voters who had applied for pre-polling.