Thursday 25 / April / 2024
Muscat: Sayyid Hamoud Faisal Al Busaidi, Minister of Interior, has said that His Majesty Sultan Haitham bin Tarik accorded attention to activating the role of municipal councils.
The minister underlined His Majesty’s keenness on upgrading the councils’ legislations to empower them to realize more partnership with the government in municipal affairs, notably by boosting the overall development march and the growth of governorates—so that the councils could serve as channels of national action aimed to accomplish the goals of Oman Vision 2040.
The minister said in a speech that, over the past period, the government embarked on the modernization of procedures regulating elections in line with this vision and its approaches for digital transition. The action, he said, involved the automation of all steps and stages of the electoral process. It begins from the moment the names of voters are entered in the Electoral Register and proceeds through the stage of candidacy to the stages of voting and votes sorting.
The minister pointed out that new high accuracy applications were implemented, to ensure both secrecy and cybersecurity. This process, he explained, is fully reliant on artificial intelligence accessed via smart phones to enable the voters from Oman and abroad to select their preferred candidates.
Sayyid Hamoud stressed that both voting and sorting operations contributed to saving time and effort, as well as financial cost. As a result, he said, the procedures were streamlined for voters, candidates contesting the elections and the supervising committees.
The minister congratulated the winning candidates who will now onwards serve as members of the municipal councils of their respective wilayats during the third term. He wished the members success in performing their missions. He also thanked all parties that contributed to the success of the elections—the government departments, the private sector establishments, the members of the preparatory and organizational committees and all those who contributed to the elections.
