Salam Abu Shahab, Staff Reporter

The first six days of voting to elect 20 members out of 479 candidates for the Federal National Council (FNC) 2019 are scheduled to start on Sunday in 118 centres at embassies and diplomatic missions in the UAE and abroad.

Two days are allocated for voting abroad, 3 for early voting and one day only for the main voting on 5 October.

Voting outside the UAE continues on Sunday and Monday, when members of electoral bodies abroad will vote at polling stations which will be opened at embassies, consulates and diplomatic missions of  the UAE on Sunday and Monday.

Voting is scheduled to start in the early hours after midnight of Saturday in New Zealand and Australia, and then will be performed in the voting centres in embassies, to be ended on Monday evening in Florida, West America.

According to the National Elections Commission (NEC), voting outside the UAE will be done manually using ballots. The votes will be counted outside the country by dedicated committees.

The NEC added it will receive the voting lists from embassies and diplomatic missions abroad before the end of September, to be including the number of voters, their names and their identity card numbers, and their votes so that the committees inside the UAE will perform the data entry in the electronic voting system before Next October.

According to NEC, the votes registered abroad will be entered into the electronic voting system before the beginning of the early voting and the main vote, to conduct the central counting by the Central Counting Committee after the end of the election on 5 October.

The counting is scheduled to take place at the main election centre in the Emirate of Abu Dhabi.

The issues of health, education and Emiratisation topped the list of most discussed topics in the programmes and campaigns of the candidates of the Federal National Council (FNC) Election 2019, which runs until Oct.4.

The focus on these three issues reflects the keenness of candidates to cover the most important issues concerning the community and open them up for discussion if they win the election, which will be held on Oct.5. Many candidates consider all levels of education, whether primary secondary or higher, to be the key issue affecting the country, which requires creating minds and focusing on developing human capital.

They also emphasised the need to consolidate the gains of the UAE’s education sector by monitoring related training and development plans, which aim to reduce the academic gap and meet the needs of the labour market for various scientific expertise.