Director of Elections, Danville Walker, was special guest at The Gleaner's Editors Forum on Wednesday, September 11. The following are excerpts of Mr. Walker's address and answers in response to questions posed by editors and senior reporters.

ON VIOLENCE

Our view is that the security forces should deal with violence in terms of an election day. Wherever we feel violence is playing a part in the elections, say preventing persons from being able to vote freely, we are going to look to void those stations. We know where you are likely to have this sort of behaviour hoping to influence the polls.

Let's face it, nobody is going to perpetrate violence in an election without an end in sight. You are expecting to get a certain result when you have the violence to intimidate people not to come out and vote or something like that and, therefore, we have looked at the constituencies and we know those in which that is likely to happen.

I wrote letters to the candidates in about eight constituencies and told them they are prime candidates for voiding.

We have done everything but we know that maybe they don't have the control of the constituencies and these so-called exuberant supporters but unfortunately they are the ones who are going to pay the price for it because they are going to have to finance another election when we void their seats; and we wanted them to be on notice that we fully expect to void these seats, once we see a certain trend taking place or the violence or any action whatsoever to interfere with the free and fair election that we expect to see.

ON GARRISON-LIKE STATIONS

We have looked at 10 constituencies and identified that there are polling stations that have garrison-like tendencies, and what I mean by garrison-like tendencies, all the votes tend to be cast or over-voting, they are all for one side. I have never seen all votes cast but distributed evenly, they are all for one side. What we have done is that we have put together a team of specialist presiding officers to man those polls. Those persons are comprised of the permanent staff of the Electoral Office, because we can now vote earlier. We are going to bring in those persons not directly involved in the election out in the constituencies, bring them in, put them up in Kingston, wherever and bus them to those polls and run those stations ourselves. With West Central St. Andrew, we are doing every single polling station.

ON OVER-VOTING

Wherever you see over-voting or you see 100 per cent voting and there are no indoor agents from one side and all the votes are for one side, it's going to be difficult to convince me that voting took place in there.

There are certain constituencies that I am very concerned with and I always begin by saying St. Andrew Eastern. There are certain locations, most of the constituency vote, fine but there are about 20 polling stations that are always voted out.

West Central St. Andrew ­ we have looked at those constituencies and we looked at those polling stations and we decided we would put in place a programme for them.

I believe when you have to void an election, the electoral management has failed. You have failed to run a good election and here is an opportunity to do it better a second time. You have a second shot at it so as an administrator of the election, I don't wish to see the voiding from the point of view that I believe we have failed to somehow put on a good election.

What our second view though is that it must not stand, the results, the fraudulent results must not stand and so we are not going to be shy about voiding them and running them a second time because maybe that is what we needed, a better opportunity.

So fine, if you wish to do that, then be lax in the control of your supporters because I am sorry, I don't buy it, I just don't buy the view that supporters go out there and create this havoc without direction.

ON VOTERS' LIST

I think the question that people tend to ask first, what's going to be different about these elections than previous elections, and I would say that there are a number of things that are going to be different.

First, let me say we will not have the electronic voting, and you know we had some feelings we would not necessarily have that and so we have been putting in place a number of other reforms.

The voters' list is a settled issue. We have had a lot of consultation and preparation of the voters' list. Every month in every constituency, the political parties have liaison officers and we meet in the constituencies, out in the field and we check the persons registered, the persons who have passed away have to come off the voters' list and any other changes with the voters' list.

ON POLLING STATIONS

We have essentially settled all the locations of where the polling stations are going to be and the only way we change them now is if there is an agreement by all the parties on the ground. But we are not going to go to a situation where we are now discussing that. That's another area that we used to have a lot of to and fro.

ON ELECTION DAY WORKERS

The next issue that we looked at was who is going to work inside the polling stations.

Quite long ago I came to realise that most of our problems in the polling stations come from inside the polling stations; nobody is coming to grab up the ballot box and run off with it. And so last November, we started on a recruitment drive to recruit persons, new people, to work in these polling stations. We have been very successful.

We recruited about 26,000 persons; weeding out and some people later become unavailable, around 5,000 of them. We have about 21,000 persons available, we need about 19,000.

Actually to do the elections you need about 16,000 people, we have 7,277 polling stations and we use about 1,500 supervisors...we are training 21,000. We have trained about 17,800 up to this point.

ON INDOOR AGENTS

The indoor agent in this election is going to have all of the information that the presiding officer has, including a voters' list with photographs. This is a significant thing because when a person comes in the polling station, everybody is going to know what that person is supposed to look like.

We are moving away from this concept that the enumerator in the house-to-house exercise is the same person who ends up as a presiding officer and therefore the presiding officer tends to know the persons. When I first came here, there was this concept that the presiding officer knows the people, and this was touted as a strength in the system.

In my opinion, it has proven to be one of the gateways through which the corruption came because the presiding officer always was claiming to know the bogus voter and the bogus voter was then given the ballot. So we are not building a system based on presiding officers knowing the electors. We are building a system based on presiding officers having the tools to identify electors. They don't know them so they have to use the tools that are available to everyone in the polling stations. Therefore we have much more transparency in the polling station and we hope that that results in a better election.

ON OPENING OF STATIONS

One of the goals of this election is 100 per cent polling stations opening at 7:00 a.m. That is something we are shooting for, and we believe it is achievable. It is as achievable as the recruitment drive of 26,000 persons. Many thought we would never get that far with recruitment and we have organised the elections around supervisors who we see as team leaders; these team leaders will have no more than five stations that they are managing and their number one objective is to open their five stations on time.

The supervisors or team leaders are also going to be there to resolve potential conflicts out in the polling stations. The problems you find on Election Day tend to be a person going to the election table, "I wish to vote" and their name is not on the voters' list.

That can simply be because you are at the wrong table and that presiding officer only has the information for that table, so cannot help you to find out where you are supposed to vote. The supervisors will be able to help you. They will have more information as to where people vote, so they will have an alphabetical listing of the entire electoral division showing where all those persons vote and therefore to resolve some of these issues.

If 25 per cent of the stations doesn't open by 11 a.m., the election in the entire constituency comes to a halt, even those that are already open will now stop and we will run that constituency over another time. It doesn't matter if it is marginal or it is Kingston West, or St. Andrew South or South West. It does not matter.