High level of preparedness for election day - Walker

WALKER

Director of Elections Danville Walker was special guest at last Wednesday's Gleaner's Editors Forum. The following are excerpts of his responses to questions posed by editors and senior reporters.

ON THE OPENING OF POLLING STATIONS

WE ARE also looking at the logistics. One of the goals of this election is 100 per cent polling stations opening at 7 a.m., that is something we are shooting for. 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.

ON PREPAREDNESS

I believe that with all the things that have been put in place and the resources that we have been given, the ability to print all of the materials in-house ­ in the 1997 elections, to give you an example, on Nomination Day you have to give each candidate four copies of the voters' list, each candidate gets four copies of the voters' list, if you have three political parties contesting each seat, that is sixty times four times two, that is 480 sets, and you have 60 constituencies with four candidates for each constituency, that's 240 of the list, but it is four versions.

The voters' list, one set is over 60,000 pages, so we need about 14 to 15 sets of the voters' lists usually just to begin Nomination Day. Once you have additional candidates, independent candidates or otherwise, you need more copies for those constituencies and at 60,000 pages you are into millions of pages. In 1997, the week-end leading up to the Election Day was the same time we were coming out with the voters' list, so you had to finish publishing the voters' list and then somehow manage to get all of these produced and copied, and we were producing them overseas and bringing them to Jamaica the night before Nomination Day.

As we speak now, the level of preparedness where we are now, we have all those lists copied and made and put down because it's such a difference from 1997 when you finished the numeration exercise, now we have a continuous registration exercise, so it has allowed the Electoral Office to take care of a number of the logistical procedures. We have taken advantage of lots of the technology we have acquired with the installation of the ERS (Electoral Registration System) from 1996.

ON VOTING

I was speaking at a police training session and I asked how many of them believe if they missed their day of voting they can go and vote on Election Day with the rest of us and almost every single officer in there put up his hand; and that is absolutely incorrect. If the police miss their day, they have missed their day, they don't get two opportunities to vote and the rest of the country gets one.

Now, what used to happen in the past, the procedure in the law essentially is that you have a voters' list and the police register in their constituencies just like the rest of us and then from that you make up a police voters' list and the Returning Officer is to draw a line through those names. Now, invariably in the past no line was drawn, probably more through the difficulty and timing and so many things to do three days before the Election Day; and so the policeman, if he missed his day would go to the polling station that he knows his name is on and he would be allowed to vote.

Now, the systems we have do not work that way. When we have a split voters' list where we have A Station and B Station, we print an A Station list and a B Station list. In the past you simply print two lists, send one to the A and one to the B and what would happen, people would go from one and vote there and they would know their name is on the B Station also and go to the B Station and vote there also.

So you find that what we have now is an A list and a B list and it is discrete, there is not one list that you use in both places. The police, same thing, when we make a police list, it extracts the names from the official list and makes the police list so if they were to go to the polling station on that day, their name is not going to be on that official list anymore because the police list is now an extraction and not just a copy of what was on the official list.

ON ELECTION DAY

Now, if after all of that, the next question persons going to ask, 'Director, what is it that you fear, what do you worry about on Election Day that is coming up' and to be quite honest, I always approach this job that there are those who do not want electoral reform to succeed, and I have reason to believe that that is true and I am absolutely confident that there are candidates out there who it is not very important to them whether they win fairly or not, winning is what is important and therefore they are going to try to get any advantage that they can get. I am confident that if you have well trained presiding officers who turn up on Election Day and they know the procedures, that will defeat any scheme that anyone can hatch up.