Rein in EBC’s stranglehold on voting

THE EDITOR: For citizens to become eligible electors in TT, they must first be at least 18 years old and registered by the Elections and Boundaries Commission (EBC) in their district.

But even non-citizens are legally allowed to vote. Commonwealth citizens with one-year residency can also vote (is that why the PNM keeps on winning election after election?).

Moreover, non-Commonwealth citizens with five-year residency are given voting privileges, but not in parliamentary or Tobago House of Assembly elections.

Giving non-citizens the right to vote is a travesty that leaves the door open to fraud by those in power, and even by the EBC, which is a standalone entity under the jurisdiction of the President.

Allowing the EBC, which is headed by the President-appointed chairman and the chief election officer (CEO), to set its agenda gives the illusion of non-political interference, but with no oversight it could be an ignis fatuus – a trick to fool an unsuspecting public.

What if a political operative with a surreptitiously biased stratagem becomes the chairman or the CEO? They can ride roughshod over the electoral process and make a sham of the proceedings. Hopefully, that will never transpire. But why take chances?

To avoid that from occurring, the estimable Senate should participate in choosing the chairman and the CEO.

With a knife-edge voting result often the norm, we could very likely have non-citizens deciding the outcome of the general election and, therefore, who will become our prime minister and hence the leader of Parliament and the nation.

Even the UK, on which our Constitution is patterned, does not allow non-citizens to vote in parliamentary elections, only in local elections. Neither does the US in which non-citizens, including permanent legal residents, cannot vote in federal, state and most local elections.

We must end this presumption that the EBC cannot become a partisan entity by placing safeguards via constitutional reform to block non-citizens from our parliamentary elections and even local elections where they can overwhelm areas where our porous borders allow illegal immigrants to enter and gain residency, thereby making them eligible for voting rights.

Moreover, while we are reorganising the EBC, we can stop this foolishness of using electoral ink to determine who already voted based on an ink-stained finger. While many believe that indelible ink takes days to wash away, according to online searches, the ink can be removed and cheaters can register in more than one district to vote multiple times.

In countries with a strong computer- based identification system, even without resorting to electoral ink, such as the US and the UK, the identification system is robust enough to prevent voter fraud without having to resort to ink stains to identify cheaters.

In the US you just show up at the polling station, give them your name and address (ID not required), and they quickly locate you on their list of eligible voters, and usher you into the voting booth. In many districts, the polling station is a local firehouse or school where polling workers are your friends, neighbours or acquaintances who will recognise and beckon you over.

Furthermore, in the US there is no separate government-issued ID other than a driver’s licence, or a photo ID issued by the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV), or a photo ID issued by the post office. In the UK several types of official IDs are acceptable for voting, such as a DL, passport, or PASS card, et al.

TT needs to rid itself of the EBC’s ID and breathe life into the moribund post office by mandating them to offer government photo IDs to any citizen with a valid TT birth certificate.

Passing and enforcing strict laws that will imprison and fine those who voted illegally is a powerful incentive to vote only once; ink is not required. Will our next election be fair? To ensure it’s fair we have to have constitutional reform that will change the EBC’s modus operandi and improve voting access to all, especially the poor who have suffered the most under successive deleterious governments since our independence.

REX CHOOKOLINGO

rexchook@gmail.com