NORMAN GRINDLEY/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
By-election in Glengoffe, St. Catherine, in November 2004.Gareth Manning, Gleaner Writer
The Electoral Office of Jamaica (EOJ) says it may take up to six months to prepare for local government elections if the electronic voter identification and ballot issuing system (EVBIS) is to
be used.
Local Government elections are constitutionally due between March and June this year. The system may not be ready due to budgetary and logistical constraints, Director of Elections Danville Walker says.
The EVBIS, which was first used in Jamaica in 2004, verifies voters by using a global
positioning system which should allow the EOJ to accurately
identify constituencies and polling station boundaries. It also identifies voters by scanning
fingerprints.
Mr. Walker says funding for implementing the system has not been secured. He added that it would take up to six months to set up the system after funding is allocated.
"An election that uses computers is going to cost significantly more than an election that does not use computers," he told The Sunday Gleaner.
proposals for more tests
While reluctant to say how much would be needed to set up the equipment islandwide, he disclosed that the Electoral Advisory Committee was looking at proposals to run more tests in other constituencies. The committee will then meet with the Minister of Finance to discuss how soon funds could be allocated for expansion.
"Unless you are going to fund the electoral system so that it is ready to have an election and you want to have the [EVBIS] system, it's either you fund the electoral office where you have the computers all the time and it has the staff all the time, or there is a lead time," Mr. Walker explained.
"If I tell you it's going to take four to six months then you will have to give me four to six months." He added that while the system is designed to eliminate a magnitude of malpractice issues associated with ballot elections, its implementation could also pose some logistical problems.
But while an electronic voter system would not be ready for elections in June, Mr. Walker notes that the EOJ is prepared to run a regular election.
"If you ask me to put on an election tomorrow using the
regular ballot system, yes, I can do it," he says.
A voters' list has been in place since November. The list, however, has been criticised by Jamaica Labour Party leader Bruce Golding at a press conference last Monday. Mr. Golding said there were 300,000 names that needed verification and claimed that the addresses of several persons were inaccurate.
Mr. Walker says the EOJ is currently verifying those names. He says up to 25 per cent of persons on the voters' list prior to November have changed their addresses, and that may account for a number of people who need to be verified. The figure, he says, is far less than 300,000.
He says EOJ staffers are currently patrolling constituencies to identify the new locations of people who have changed addresses since the publication of the voters' list.
