Premier and Minister of Finance Dr the Honourable D. Orlando Smith said that Government will be taking seriously the recommendations of the Commonwealth Elections Observer Mission on the June 8, 2015 general elections. Photo: VINO

The Commonwealth Elections Observer Mission here for the June 8, 2015 general elections have noted their contention with what they saw as the need to even up the playing field when it comes to access to air and television time and for the streamlining of the voting and counting process. Photo: VINO

The counting process underway following the end of the voting process. Photo: VINO/File

Lines were long at some polling places on election day. Photo: VINO/File

He was responding to questions by this news site at a BVI Finance cocktail held at the Cutlass Towers in Road Town yesterday September 16, 2015.

The Commonwealth Elections Observer Mission released its Final Report on the elections and made a number of recommendations, including putting in place a full Elections Commission and regulating campaign financing and making changes to the way votes are counted and verified.

"We were very happy and comfortable that the Observers came to see our elections in the BVI. As I understand it they were generally satisfied with how the elections were conducted," said Premier Smith.

"We will certainly read the report and take it very seriously and I'm sure we will be putting into place most of the recommendations," he said. "I have not as yet gone through the report but I will be (going through it)."

Pointing to one of the main recommendations with regards to the Elections Commission, Premier Smith said that this is something Government intends to take seriously and Cabinet will engage in discussions on this and the other recommendations made in the report.

However, when asked for a timeline, Premier Smith said the chances of the recommendations being dealt with during this year are slim to none.

"The elections have just taken place so there will be some time before the next election, but we will deal with them with some manner of urgency," he said.

See previous article published on September 15, 2015:

Election observers recommend faster counting process, equitable media access

- also point to changes needed in voter process with regard to alphabetical order of names

ROAD TOWN, Tortola, VI – The Commonwealth Elections Observer Mission here for the June 8, 2015 general elections have noted their contention with what they saw as the need to even up the playing field when it comes to access to air and television time and for the streamlining of the voting and counting process.

According to the Mission’s Final Report released last week, they recommend the creation of a media watchdog to establish and enforce regulations that evenly distribute air and television time, as well as space in print media, “to guarantee that all parties and candidates have equal access to and balanced coverage by the media to the public.”

With regards to voting, the report recommended that as required by the voting procedures, Poll Clerks should consistently ask voters to confirm their names and addresses, even when identification is provided.

“The intention of creating voter registration cards should proceed and be in place before the next election, alongside a rigorous voter education programme,” said the Final Report.

Laborious

It called for the quickening of the “laborious” process of registering each voter by having the Poll Clerk handwriting each voter’s name, address and occupation in the poll book (as reflected in the voter list). “Simply drawing a red line through the voter’s name on the voter list to indicate the person has voted (and to avoid duplicate voting) would be more efficient and reduce queues,” the report said.

The observers found that those stations which predominantly distributed both (district and territorial) ballots papers together were much quicker at processing voters and therefore had shorter or no queues.

“It is recommended that Presiding Officers always give both ballots simultaneously to the voter, unless there is an exceptional situation where that would be detrimental to the voter or potentially undermine their voting intention. Colour of the differing ballot papers should be altered as some voters indicated a difficulty in reading the text on darker coloured paper,” the report said.

They noted that for the larger polling stations that were divided into two, the voter list should be divided in half or a third by the amount of people and subsequently divided alphabetically “and not necessarily by ‘A-M’ and ‘N-Z’, as ‘A-M’ tended to have much longer queues.”

Proxy voting

The report said that for those voters who live, work or study abroad and are unable to return to cast their ballots in an election, an option, such as proxy or postal voting, with the required safeguards, should be explored to ensure the maximum enfranchisement of the electorate.

“Consideration should be given for voters themselves to be able to place their own ballot paper in the ballot box and should not (unless support is required for incapacity reasons) be obliged to hand it to the Presiding Officer to do so on their behalf, which might compromise the secrecy of the ballot,” the report said, noting that this would also save time in the voting process.

Counting

The Observer Mission said that to speed up the counting process, rather than have one official read out the individual name(s) of candidates on each ballot paper and then show each ballot to everyone seated round the table, polling station staff (at district level) or counting staff (at territorial level) should be divided into teams to sort and count the ballots by candidate, with party agents having clear access to the counting tables and visibility of the counting process.

“To avoid a delay in starting the territorial counting process, it should commence as soon as the first boxes arrive from the districts and continue on a rolling basis until finalised,” it said. This is in wake of the countless hours it took before the territorial votes could commence being counted.

Speaking with this news site days ago, Supervisor of Elections Juliette Penn said that the Government will be the ones to take any action in light of the report’s recommendations.