The issue of applications to change voting location has taken on serious dimensions, with the Election Service facing mass objections for examination.
The Mayor of Lakatamia, Photoula Hadjipapa, made a public statement yesterday, even urging her constituents in the morning to lodge objections for cases where they knew they had declared their residence as their Municipality while residing elsewhere.
Information from the Election Service indicates that yesterday there were mass objections coming mainly from parties in all provinces.
Specifically, according to our information, more than 3,500 objections were submitted for individuals on the electoral rolls, which will be examined by Friday.
Yesterday was the last day that the electoral rolls were posted, and the last day to submit objections. Detailed data on the objections is expected to be available today.
Lakatamia is one of the areas where there was intense speculation about mass relocation applications, and yesterday there was a large number of objections from the AKEL side.
According to information, around 230 objections were submitted only for this Municipality, accompanied by supporting documents.
In this specific Municipality, there were over 1,000 relocation applications. Specifically, as claimed, there were applications for relocations with declared addresses as supermarkets, empty plots, or even houses of other families.
In a preliminary check conducted, it was found that there were cases where they admitted over the phone that the residence address was different.
There were also cases of individuals who declared a specific address en masse. The problem, as reported, was not only in the relocation applications but also in new registrations, where it was observed, as claimed, a declaration of a different address from the residence.
Mayor Hadjipapa in her statement yesterday even mentioned an attempt to alter the election result. A complaint that is particularly serious, calling on the competent authorities to address the situation.
“As the Mayor of Lakatamia, I feel obligated to stand up for the citizens I represent, the real ones and not the pawns, regarding this sad development,” Hadjipapa said in her statement, adding, “it would be a shame if even the slightest tolerance is shown to such dishonest practices on this new page of Local Governance. Practices that undermine the democratic will of our citizens. The blow to our Democracy would be enormous.”
She called on the residents of Lakatamia, Tseri, and Anthoupolis Settlement to block the road against the coordinated effort to alter the election outcome.
“On my part, I will do everything possible within my jurisdiction to prevent such undemocratic, unethical, and unacceptable methods. We don’t play games with Democracy,” she said.
It should be noted that, in statements to Kathimerini, the other mayoral candidate for Lakatamia, Loukas Eleftheriou, commented on the issue condemning the above practices, while at the same time noting that in recent years many couples have relocated to Lakatamia and wondering why it’s not surprising that today, based on the census, 50,000 citizens live in Lakatamia, while only 24,000 vote.
He mentioned that there is a gap in legislation, which requires time-consuming procedures for an application to change a voter’s residence, from a community leader’s stamp to the delivery of the application to the District Administration.
Eleftheriou said that he and his team undertook this task to facilitate citizens.
Asked how many relocations they made as a team, he replied that they keep this number to themselves, but of course, he added, this number is in the hundreds.
“If anyone declared the wrong residence, we have no responsibility,” Eleftheriou stressed.
As he said, most citizens, from whom they collected the applications, provided their details to his team at the same time and electricity bills, to correctly record the addresses.
The peculiarities with the mass relocation applications are also evident from the statistics as the number of relocation applications this year is three times that of 2016. Most concern the Nicosia and Limassol provinces, which are also the most populous.
At the same time, however, as it is said, the supporting documents requested varied from provincial administration to provincial administration.
Relocation applications are always high in Local Government elections due to their specificity and the fact that the vote is more personal. Their impact in these elections is enormous, and the number of candidates is another factor that played a role.
