Mohammed Saneem Photo: supplied
The Supervisor of Elections in Fiji Mohammed Saneem says it's impossible for voters to be registered twice on the electoral roll.
He was responding to questions about an apparent discrepancy between the number of voters registered with the Fijian Election Office and recent census figures.
Just over 634 thousand people had registered to vote in the November election by mid September, while the 2017 census shows a population of 580,332 people of voting age.
Around 15,000 new voters come on stream every year, according to Mr Saneem, who's confident in his office's data and systems.
"The voter registration system in Fiji registers voters based on their biometric data as well as iris measurement," he said.
"Both these are universally recognised as a means to record persons to prevent duplicity and this data is directly verifiable and we constantly run adjudication to ensure the data is always current and up to date."
"Should there be any instance where there is a 75 percent match or more, the Fijian Elections Office will immediately carry out a manual verification to ensure that it is not a case of duplicity," Mr Saneem said.
The only such case there has been since 2012 is before the courts, he said.
"It is impossible for someone to maintain dual registration under the current system and that is the whole reason why we have procured such a system."
Mr Saneem told Fiji media there were a few problems that come with census data but that was best answered by the Fiji Bureau of Statistics.
He said his office was confident it had accurate data and any other organisation that had published data was welcome to come and verify it with the voter list.
