Fiji’s Coalition Government has ruled out an independent audit of the “glitch” that disrupted vote counting during the 2022 General Election, focusing instead on strengthening processes to prevent future errors.
In a statement following a Cabinet briefing this week, the government reiterated the findings of a review conducted by the Fijian Elections Office (FEO) after the 2022 election, which attributed the glitch to human error.
The government stated that a review of the Results Management Information System (RMIS) identified the issue as a manual data transfer mistake, which was “quickly rectified” by IT personnel.
“The focus will now be on strengthening operational processes and introducing preventive measures to ensure greater accuracy and efficiency in future elections,” the Cabinet statement read.
The “glitch” occurred on the night of December 14, 2022, just hours after polling stations closed at 6 pm. The FEO’s Results App, widely used to track vote counts in real-time, displayed highly unusual vote tallies.
According to the FEO’s 110-page report, incorrect data was manually transferred from the RMIS database to the app, causing significant anomalies. In particular, two candidates were shown receiving 28,000 and 14,000 votes, respectively—figures that were wildly inconsistent with other results at that stage of counting. The FEO quickly took down the results platform, deleted the published data, and re-uploaded it with corrected figures. However, by then, the incident had already shaken public confidence in the integrity of the vote count, prompting calls for an investigation into the “glitch.”
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