From 2027 to 2032: Masere’s Moving Deadline.

by Michael Joseph Passingan

Papua New Guinea has been promised a clean, biometric electoral roll for twelve years. The National Identification (NID) project launched in November 2014 as the foundation for credible elections. Two general elections have passed since, a third is months away, and on 29 October the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) finally published a biometric enrolment timetable that, in its own words, "does not introduce electronic or biometric voting".

Even those dates are soft. The SevisWallet enrolment window, 13 December to 12 February 2027, is subject to Electoral Commission approval, legal requirements and readiness assessments. De-duplication has to follow, which pushes any cleaned roll deep into an election year. That is a press release with a calendar attached.

NID cards were never going to reach voters before the 2017 election; that was clear by January 2016. In 2021 the Electoral Commission had biometric kits ready, yet it launched biometric enrolment for 2022 only in NCD and Central. In February 2025, UPNG academic Andrew Anton Mako estimated the NID would have cost about K500 million by year's end while registering 30 to 40 per cent of the population. Administrative Services Minister Richard Masere has himself put spending at K461 million, against 1.2 million cards issued, duplicates included.

Government figures reported in July still put about 3.6 million of an estimated 5.9 million adults outside the national ID register. Those citizens are now told to download an app and enrol for a SevisPass over Christmas and the new year. DICT promises agents and mobile teams for people without suitable phones, but its release names no budget for either. The Electoral Commission's whole 2026 allocation was K50 million, The National reported in July, with none of it earmarked for biometrics.

DICT cannot plead surprise. Secretary Steven Matainaho proposed e-voting for the 2027 election in June 2023. In October 2025 he told an Electoral Commission workshop that e-voting was "still possible if we move decisively and in unity". In May this year his department signed an MOU with CPA PNG billed as bringing biometric voting to the accountants' body. Accountants get biometric ballots; citizens get a disclaimer.

Masere answers in Parliament for the census, the NID and the electoral roll, and his deadlines move faster than his programmes. In November 2024, coverage of his RNZ Pacific interview reported targets of NID cards for all by 2025 and biometric voting by 2027. In September 2025, pressed over a stale roll and unregistered 18-year-olds, he offered no firm timetable. In July this year, at the NRI Chairman's Seminar in Lae, he moved biometric and electronic voting to 2032.

He has added five years to his own target and explained none of them.

Masere's 2024 census left enumerators unpaid for months. The government ordered K17 million in tablets, some of which reached Port Moresby enumerators a month after counting began. In March 2025 he told Parliament he had delivered the count "in record time and with record budget", while a ministerial decision kept the population figure from the public.

Popondetta, in his own Oro Province, is on his photo-roll trial list. Its voters may recall how he explained crossing from National Alliance to Peter O'Neill's PNC weeks after winning Ijivitari in 2017: political agendas and personal integrity, he told local media, were the "last things" on his mind, and better access to public funds for his district was the point. In 2019 he crossed again, to Marape's camp.

Opposition Leader James Nomane wants the Prime Minister to remove the administrative oversight arrangement over the Electoral Commission, so that Dr Nicole Haley answers to the Constitution, not to a minister. He is right. Haley, appointed on 30 June for four years, is the first real chance in a decade to fix the roll, and she does not need a ministry whose dates are decorative.

PNG is not short of technology. SevisPass exists, and the Commission held biometric kits five years ago. What PNG lacks is anyone in government willing to be held to a date. The 2032 target is two elections away, and every vote counted on an inflated roll until then belongs on Masere's record and DICT's letterhead