In his briefing at the House of Representatives (HoR) in Tobruk on Monday about the electoral process, the Head of the High National Elections Commission (HNEC) Emad Al-Sayeh, confirmed that the commission tried as much as possible to stay away from political polarization to reach the date that was set on December 24 for the start of the elections.
Al-Sayeh stated that in 2020, a group of HoR members who were in the Libyan Political Dialogue Forum “the Committee of 75” were contacted and consulted with the HNEC regarding this date. The question was about “Can the HNEC carry out presidential and parliamentary elections on December 24, 2021?” and the answer was: “Yes.”
The reason for that is that the period of time available to the HNEC was a year, which is sufficient for the possibility of implementing the electoral process.
Al-Sayeh also touched on spending on the HNEC and the electoral process, as the implementation, preparation for this process began when an amount of 93 million dinars was allocated to this process, of which 50 million dinars were allocated by the Government of National Accord, and another amount of 43 million was added to it by the Government of National Unity, indicating that 55 million dinars have been spent so far.
He also spoke about those who might wonder about the enormity of this amount spent on the electoral process and explained that it went in two directions, the first to renovate the HNEC after six years of budgets allocated to it, in addition to the terrorist attack that took place in May 2018 and led to the bombing of the headquarters of the HNEC in Tripoli, forcing the HNEC to renovate it again.
He said that this amount was allocated for two electoral processes, and therefore it was necessary for the HNEC to provide sufficient and necessary funding to accomplish the task.
Al-Sayeh clarified the circumstances of the two elections laws and said that on September 8 and October 5, 2021, respectively, two laws were issued, the first is the law on the election of the president and the second is the law on the election of the House of Representatives. He added that “before that, in the process of preparing for this process, the HNEC addressed the House of Representatives to form a committee to formulate electoral laws, and this committee was composed of members from the House of Representatives, as well as with the participation of the HNEC and experts of the United Nations Support Mission in Libya.”
“But what happened is that the Commission received laws completely different from what was discussed at the Rome meeting, or through the committee that was formed for this purpose. implementation of the laws.” He indicated.
Al-Sayeh stressed in this regard that the commission addressed the House of Representatives on October 7, 2021, with the need to introduce amendments to these laws, which would enable it to move forward in implementing those laws.
Al-Sayeh added that he and the members of the HNEC expected that in the event that amendments were not made to the two laws; the electoral process will face the danger of postponement, and what happened is that the HoR did not respond to the amendments, and the response was that “the HNEC’s request for the amendment is not new.”
He also held HoR responsible for receiving the laws, as the HNEC requested delivery at the beginning of July last year, but the delivery was delayed to September and October.
In this regard, Al-Sayeh said that the HNEC’s commitment that December 24 will be the polling day for the first round of implementing the president’s election law prompted it to start the voter registration process, which was a success par excellence.
He said the HNEC succeeded in adding more than half a million Libyan voters to the database, followed by opening the registration door for voters of the Libyan communities residing abroad, to begin the process of issuing electoral cards for about 2.8 million Libyan voters and the process of distributing approximately 2.5 million voter cards, so that the HNEC sped up the process of opening the door for candidacy to accept applications for the presidential and parliament elections.
Al-Sayeh referred to Article 17 of Law No.1 of 2021, which specifies the time period for opening the door for admission to candidacy from 10 to 30 days. Nevertheless, the HNEC set two weeks for opening the candidacy door. He also referred to Article 18, which indicates that the HNEC must announce the initial candidacy lists within two days from the time the applications were received, saying that from here, indications began to appear to disrupt the electoral process.
He noted that expectations regarding applications for candidacy for the presidential elections are lower, so that everyone was surprised that they reached nearly a hundred presidential candidacy applications, most of which came in the last four days of registration, and that had caused confusion regarding the accurate review of candidacy applications through which to determine the validity of information included in these applications for all candidates, during the last 48 hours, the number reached 60 applications for presidential candidacy.
Al-Sayeh talked about the existence of a lot of fraud and manipulation in the recommendations, and so on, which hindered the work of the HNEC regarding the announcement of the initial list of candidates.
