Postal ballots for next week's elections in the Marshall Islands will cause delays in the counting of votes.
More than 36,000 voters are eligible to vote in the poll, which is to be monitored by Pacific Islands Forum observers.
Our correspondent in Majuro, Giff Johnson, says a technical requirement with overseas ballots will put the vote count on hold.
"Those ballots are allowed to arrive up to 14 days after the election date and cannot be counted until 14 days after November 19th. So the net affect of that is that those ballots cannot start to be counted until December 3rd, and the final unofficial results will not be known until some time that week, in early December."
Giff Johnson says in the past there were just a few dozen overseas ballots but now more than a 1,000 are expected.
