Fewer than half of JTA delegates verified for presidential election
Published:Monday | October 19, 2020 | 7:21 AMAlbert Ferguson/Gleaner Writer
Western Bureau:
This month’s polls to find a president-elect for the Jamaica Teachers’ Association (JTA) could be a low-keyed affair, as according to Jasford Gabriel, fewer than half of the association’s 25,000 delegates have been verified to cast ballots.
“In excess of 10,000 delegates have been verified to vote,” said Gabriel, the sitting president, as he confirmed that the virtual election would still go ahead at the end of the month.
During the JTA’s 56th annual conference in Montego Bay in August, Byron Farquharson, the association’s secretary general, told delegates that it was in talks with The University of the West Indies to see if it could help the JTA to conduct the online poll. It is not yet clear which entity was finally chosen to manage the electronic voting, which was originally scheduled for July.
“The JTA managed the verification of the [delegates’] data, and then we will look at the options we have in deciding who will conduct the elections on our behalf,” said Gabriel. “We have not fully signed off yet in terms of that aspect.”
The delegates at this year’s conference supported a resolution which mandated that a presidential election must be held using several options, to include the normal process, where teachers vote in their parish; online voting; or a combination of both.
“What I can assure you is that it [the president-elect election] is going to be online. There is no debate as to the mode. It will be held online for sure,” said Gabriel.
“We were mandated by the conference to have it by midterm, but we had delays in terms of the verification of the data and we are expecting that by the end of this month, we will be able to get the election out of the way,” he added.
“The end of November is a reasonable time for us to declare a president-elect. Once the elections are out of the way, we will meet to decide in terms of the time frame within which to have that declaration,” said the president.
Winston Smith, the principal of Golden Spring Primary School in St Andrew, and Godfrey Drummond, a senior teacher at Petersfield Primary School in Westmoreland, are the two candidates vying for the post.