The Editor, Sir:

I had promised my family, staff, friends and especially my children and young colleagues that I would write the press if my assumptions and beliefs in the efficiency and check systems of the Electoral Office of Jamaica (EOJ) were proven to be flawed. I now seriously question the validity of the electoral lists. I will try to explain.

My family and I are about to enter the third national election in which a person is registered to vote at my house who has never lived there. I have done everything reasonably possible to have this anomaly corrected to no avail. I will try to explain.

This was first discovered three national elections ago when the voters information cards were delivered to my home, which has only two registered voters, my wife and I, and a third card was received for a woman who does not live there. This was reported both to the Returning Officer and the CAFFE representative on the day of election. Both took notes and told me to report it to the EOJ. This has been done so many times that I have lost count. I have been on talk shows on the radio and the host has discussed it with Mr. Walker, who has dismissed the claim as probably just another spurious one which will show that the person worked there many years before and just registered there.

I own my townhouse home and have lived there for the past 15 years with my family only, and it has had only one previous owner who has never heard of the person. None of my neighbours who have lived here since just after the scheme was built have ever seen or heard of this person. The EOJ have a photo of the lady on record and have visited my home on at least two occasions, outside of the normal enumeration exercises, to verify whether the woman lives here and we have confirmed that she does not. We have even signed a paper to this effect and were promised that it would be corrected for this election. To our disbelief yesterday the voters information cards were delivered to my house and guess what, she is still on the list.

You see, I believe that it is important to give our institutions a chance to prove their worth, to support their initiatives and not 'talk them down', indeed to give them the benefit of the doubt when they make the effort to improve their performance in any area.

The role of the youth

I have discussed with young people their role in national development and the importance of participating in the processes which cement their rights and assist in delivering justice to our people. I have insisted that my staff participate in our democracy by doing jury service, I implore them to enumerate and to vote their conscience at election time. I tell the students in my care that they cannot expect to benefit from a society to which they are not prepared to contribute. To come and demand scholarships and bursaries, then not enumerate or vote, to avoid the paying of taxes and finally seek to leave Jamaica and denigrate our national efforts at every opportunity is unpatriotic and destructive.

However, I find myself fighting a battle that increasingly I believe I cannot win. To get support for your efforts you must perform well, and you must do so consistently and sustainedly. While I believe that the EOJ has made strides forward, my personal experiences over the past many years means that I am unwilling to defend them in future discussions with the young, eligible but unregistered voters. I no longer believe the claims that the list is sanitised, etc., and now join the ranks of cynics and disbelievers.

I will, of course, continue to support the goals of the Electoral Office of Jamaica but until this anomaly is corrected I cannot defend the efficiency of this office, or indeed the assertion of an even relatively clean electoral list.

I am, etc.,

L. MARK TAYLOR

Head of School

The Caribbean School of Architecture

University of Technology

237 Old Hope Road

Kingston 6

Jamaica