East Timor vote count begins amid heavy security
East Timor vote count begins amid heavy security
By Dwi Atmanta & Budiman Moerdijat
DILI, East Timor (JP): The United Nations Mission in East Timor (UNAMET) began counting on Wednesday the votes cast in Monday's landmark ballot in this troubled province.
Heavily guarded by UN civilian police and Indonesian police personnel, the counting center is located in a museum next to East Timor Police Headquarters in the East Dili area of Komoro.
UNAMET helicopters crisscrossed the province on Tuesday to deliver the ballot boxes to the provincial capital.
The white choppers were seen landing in a local air base in the West Dili area of Fatuhada and the boxes were then transported by UNAMET staff to the counting center.
UNAMET said the counting would be centralized in Dili to ensure secrecy and that it would take a week to finalize the results.
UNAMET spokesman Yasuhiro Ueki told journalists here on Wednesday that all the ballot boxes from the nine regional headquarters in the province had arrived by Tuesday afternoon.
"The count started this morning at 6 a.m. This is a reconciliation count to match the number of ballots that have been cast to the number of registered voters," Ueki explained. According UNAMET, 432,287 votes were cast in Monday's ballot, a turnout of 98.6 percent of registered voters.
More than 451,000 people in and outside East Timor registered to participate in the ballot to decide whether to accept or reject the status of wide-ranging autonomy under Indonesia.
Although the ballot boxes have already been opened, UNAMET deputy chief electoral officer Carlos Valenzuela emphasized that actual counting would only be conducted later this week.
"Today (Wednesday) we are counting ballots, but we are not counting results," Valenzuela said.
He said that after receiving all ballot boxes, each box was opened so UNAMET could "make sure that everything inside the box corresponds to the forms and all the ballots that were issued are accounted for".
Valenzuela said UNAMET would combine all the ballots for counting.
"Once the ballots are mixed together they will be distributed to the counting teams and they will count the results," Valenzuela explained, adding that the actual counting would take one or two days.
UNAMET chief electoral officer Jeff Fischer said on Monday that ballots from the regencies would be mixed together "so that no ballot would be able to be tied back to a particular polling station".
About 100 UN volunteers would be deployed to count the ballots working in two shifts every day.
The morning shift starts at 6 a.m. and lasts until 2 p.m., while the evening shift lasts from 3 p.m. to 2 a.m.
Valenzuela pledged there would be maximum transparency "through the presence of observers".
But UNAMET officials said the total number of observers admitted to the counting center, including international and domestic observers, would not exceed 30 at any one time.
Indonesia and Portugal are each entitled three observers in the counting center at any given time.
"Each observer group that has been accredited by UNAMET will have the right to have one person present at one time except for official observers from Indonesia and Portugal," Valenzuela said.
He said there are about 3,000 observers now in the province.
"They can file any complaint to UNAMET but they will not have the right to intervene or disrupt the counting process," he said.
The poll results would then be certified by an independent electoral commission and then officially announced by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan.