Democracy at a snail’s pace

- Photo courtesy Pixabay
- Photo courtesy Pixabay

WHILE some reported a smooth process during yesterday’s general election, others spoke of long lines and a slow process at polling stations.

Indeed, one candidate said it took her just four minutes to vote, another almost an hour.

The Elections and Boundaries Commission (EBC) is an independent organisation. But it has to be accountable.

Granted, several new measures were necessary to deal with the pandemic. Officials distributed masks, social distancing was maintained and sanitisation occurred at several stages.

Did these contribute to delays? The mixed feedback suggests they may or may not have.

Assuming the precautions caused longer voting times, this was not unforeseeable. Still, it is disappointing that many were caught off guard over just how long it would take to exercise their right to vote.

The EBC has a direct hand in this. Its job includes educating the public over the voting process.

Did the EBC determine the process would take longer? Did it make any recommendations as to the need to extend voting hours?

Officials may still be smarting from a court ruling that found a spur-of-the-moment decision, in 2015, to extend voting hours unlawful.

But heavy rainfall on polling day is not the same as a global pandemic of which we have had knowledge for months.

The EBC held closed-door meetings with the PNM and the UNC. It received an additional budget of $43 million. It wrote to Cabinet to pass an amendment to its governing statute when it missed a deadline.

Throughout all of this it was asked, repeatedly, to be transparent about its preparedness. If it determined, through its own exercises, that more time was needed, that should have been communicated to all. If it did not so determine, that was an oversight.

As things stand, even smaller parties have voiced complaints about the EBC. Some allege they have either been mislabelled or omitted in official notices. These apparent errors were compounded yesterday by police wrongly refusing people entry to polling stations owing to the colour of their T-shirts. The EBC could have clarified this issue via simple, clear communications in advance.

Compounding all of this is the feeling that when it comes to how votes are counted and tabulated, it seems our systems are stuck in time.

The EBC has a useful website, yes, but its scope is limited.

Why cannot the process of counting votes be digitised?

Why should counting ballots cast in two relatively small islands by a relatively small electorate take so long? Should the EBC and election officials not be scanning ballots and speedily having results transmitted and then distributed? Why should tallies have to be phoned in?

There are understandable fears that electronic systems are easier to tamper with. Indeed, the famous “no vote” campaign of 1971 was triggered by concerns about voting machines. But manual systems are at least as vulnerable, as we saw in Guyana.

A modern, forward-thinking EBC embracing modern methods could avoid a lot of the confusion.

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"Democracy at a snail’s pace"

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