Mission ‘improbable’

With significant advancements in the country’s electoral system, it would take massive collusion among electoral officers as well as the ruling Jamaica Labour Party’s (JLP) and opposition People’s National Party’s (PNP) indoor and outdoor agents to pull off election fraud. That’s according to current and former directors of elections.

Opposition Leader Mark Golding last Sunday, while on the platform during a constituency conference in St Andrew East Rural, made comments to suggest that every living Comrade and even the dead ones should come out and vote out the JLP. Since The Gleaner first posted video of Golding making the comment, the PNP president has faced howls of disapproval and calls to withdraw the comment which critics cited as harking back to ‘the dark days of the 1970s when ‘dead voters’ were a well-known feature of a highly questionable voting process.

A flurry of statements from the various arms of the ruling party, as well as civil society organisations, rapped Golding on Monday for the ‘reckless’ comments.

The PNP, in response to the outcry, said the comments were lighthearted humour in reaction to banter from the crowd.

But on Tuesday, Government Minister Daryl Vaz brought a censure motion against Golding in the Parliament. Minister of Legal and Constitutional Affairs Marlene Malahoo Forte, in a tweet, suggested that Golding could lose his place in the Parliament for telling Comrades to vote in the names of the dead.

During a press conference at the Office of the Leader of the Opposition in St Andrew, Golding, amid the mounting public pressure, walked back the comments, reitarating that they were never intended to be taken seriously.

He said he was in no way encouraging anyone to vote in the names of the dead.

After Golding’s withdrawal of the comment, Vaz indicated yesterday evening on radio that he would no longer pursue the censure motion as he had other things to do with his time.

But with the immediate matter of Golding’s comments out of the way, The Gleaner sought to determine just how far Jamaica has come from the threat of ‘dead voters’ determining the outcome of elections.

Director of Elections Glasspole Brown told The Gleaner that the advancements in electoral procedures and practices in the island over the past 25 years have made the phenomenon of the dead voting “almost impossible”.

“It is not easy unless there is massive collusion in the polling station on the day,” Brown said.

“We use an elector’s biometrics to make sure that one is on the voters’ list with the use of fingerprints. We have now upgraded it to not just fingerprints, but to include facial recognition. That is the new system that we have in place. We have now improved in terms of the Automated Biometric Identification System (ABIS). So what it does from registration is that from you go into a registration centre/constituency office, we take your fingerprint and match it against the entire database.”

He said every fingerprint is cross-matched in the database of more than two million electors.

“In terms of the dead person voting on election day, that is almost impossible. You have to present an identification which has a photograph and other data. If the person does not have an identification, each polling station is given a database for everybody who is on that list. That is the black book. The black book has a pictorial representation of all the electors, covering every data for each individual,” he explained.

He says the Electoral Office has now gone beyond that, giving access to not just presiding officers and poll clerks, but to the scrutineers, who represent the different candidates and who also have a picture list.

“So if someone comes in there, you can match that person’s photograph with that in the database. So for somebody who has died and somebody turns up as that person, it would have to be collusion between the presiding officer, poll clerk, agents representing the different candidates,” he explained.

Election Day officials trained by the Electoral Office of Jamaica (EOJ), he said, must make sure that no one who is not on the list gets to vote. Brown also explained that in some constituencies, the EVIBIS system is used, which verifies the elector by fingerprint and provides the authorisation for a ballot to be generated.

Brown’s position received strong support from his predecessor, Orette Fisher.

According to Fisher, it was highly improbable, but not impossible, for the dead to vote.

“In the area where the fingerprint is used, it is impossible. But in the ones where they don’t have the fingerprint verification, it is highly improbable, but not impossible. If it is done, they will be caught,” Fisher told The Gleaner last evening.

Jamaica’s electoral system became the envy of nations near and far with many requesting oversight by the EOJ, then led by Fisher, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The director is correct. It will take some massive amount of collusion for it to take place between all the persons in the polling stations,” said Fisher.

Meanwhile, Brown said there are remedies for election-day fraud.

“The law allows us to rerun elections if fraud is detected or suspected and has been proven,” he reminded.

Citing the test case for election rerun, he said the 1997 elections in St Andrew West Central, represented by the current prime minister, Andrew Holness, was rerun after fraud was proven. The seat changed hands twice, with Dr Warren Blake first declared winner. Holness was declared winner in the rerun, but the results in a division were voided because of fraud. It was also rerun. The results did not change.

Jamaica experienced significant ballot fraud and electoral malpractise prior to 1997, when ballot boxes were stolen and/or stuffed with marked ballots. In 1993, then MP for St Andrew South West Portia Simpson received 110 per cent of the votes in the constituency.

Both party’s leaders at the time, PJ Patterson and Edward Seaga, agreed to reform the voting process through the Electoral Advisory Committee, which morphed into the Electoral Commission of Jamaica.

erica.virtue@gleanerjm.com