Editorial | ECJ must speak

This newspaper has no question about the competence of Glasspole Brown or his capacity to speak with authority about the technical aspects of the conduct of elections in Jamaica.

But when it comes to the articulation of policy, we prefer to hear, indivisibly, from the Electoral Commission of Jamaica (ECJ), the nine-member body of which Mr Brown, as the director of elections (effectively, the CEO) is a single member.

The question in this instance is the ECJ’s position on calls for a full enumeration or reverification of the island’s voters, which resurfaced as a major debate in the aftermath of the September 3 general election, and how the commission’s position on the matter may have evolved over the past decade or so. The ECJ should speak, as a matter of urgency, through its chairman, Earl Jarrett.

There is a growing chorus, it appears, that the current electoral register is bloated and that its current numbers (approximately 2.1 million) understates voter participation in the island’s elections.

The commission, we remind, has legal responsibility for the management of elections in Jamaica in the framework of the island’s Representation of the People Act. By convention, Parliament also effectively cedes to the ECJ its authority over election legislation and policy by rubber-stamping its recommendations.

The system has worked well because the commission enjoys high levels of confidence and public trust.

It helps, too, that in its 46 years of existence the ECJ has transformed elections in Jamaica, which were taken from the hands of governments, from being badly tainted by violence and vote-rigging to being among the most respected in the world.

FAILED TO DECLARE ENUMERATION PERIOD

In the vote earlier this month, which gave Prime Minister Dr Andrew Holness’ Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) a third consecutive term at government, the turnout, according to the ECJ, was 39 per cent, one-and-a-half percentage points higher than five years earlier, when the election was held in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

These figures mean that only around one in five (21 per cent) of the electorate voted for the governing party. The low turnout continues a trajectory of recent years, which critics say reflects a deepening apathy of many Jamaicans towards the island’s politics and political parties.

However, some analysts, including a former director of elections, Orrette Fisher, argue that the failure of the ECJ to robustly clean the register of dead people, or people who are no longer entitled to vote, distorts the level of participation in elections. By Mr Fisher’s estimate, between 300,000 and half a million names (14 per cent to 24 per cent) should be removed from the list.

Despite little evidence of voter impersonation or similar types of fraud in Jamaica, others have joined the call for a reverification of the register as a legal and moral issue, and as part of the country’s commitment to the democratic process.

However, successive governments have failed, as would be required by the law, to declare an enumeration period or allocate the money for the exercise to happen. For example, throughout 2015, Audley Shaw, then the JLP’s shadow minister, consistently campaigned for a full enumeration. He insisted that no elections should be held on the existing list.

The following year, Mr Shaw’s party won the election. He became the finance minister. In 2017, he announced that he would allocate J$2.5 billion over two fiscal years for a re-enumeration.

Mr Shaw left Parliament at the end of the last term – but there was no follow through on the promise.

That may have been influenced in part by the posture of the ECJ, including its suggestion that there was a mechanism for removing the names of dead and ineligible voters from the register.

MECHANISM FOR REMOVING NAMES

In a 2016-2017 report to Parliament, the ECJ said: “Continuous registration is the process of continually maintaining the voters’ list by adding the names of eligible voters, as well as deleting the names of those who no longer meet eligibility requirements, for example, the dead.

“This means there is no need to automatically conduct a full enumeration/registration each election period, as was the case in previous years. A voters’ list is now produced and published twice per year, with the necessary additions and deletions. There is a cut-off date for registration, which is two months before the publication of the voter’s list.”

The report listed eight processes by which the ECJ received information for its deletions:

. Quarterly reports of deaths from the Registrar General’s Department, which the law requires that agency to provide;

. Newspaper obituaries;

. Funeral programmes;

Reports from persons in parliamentary constituencies;

. Reports from political representatives in the constituencies;

. Information from police stations across the island; and

. ”Any other credible source”.

While The Gleaner believes that 28 years is far too lengthy a gap between a major enumeration, the methods outlined in that report, if robustly pursued, and underpinned by technologically supported verification systems, should result in a voters’ register that largely mirrors what a credible list should be.

Three of the current ECJ members, including Chairman Jarrett, as well as the two JLP representatives, remain on the commission. They should be in a good position to say what has happened.