NATIONAL Security Minister Marvin Dames.
By RASHAD ROLLE
Tribune Senior Reporter
rrolle@tribunemedia.net
NATIONAL Security Minister Marvin Dames yesterday tabled the Parliamentary Elections (Amendment) Bill in the House of Assembly, which will create a permanent voter register once passed.
Currently, the voter register expires every five years.
The bill says: “A person registered as a voter entitled to vote at an election on the current register, shall remain registered as a voter entitled to vote at an election on the continuous register, unless his name is removed from the register by the parliamentary commissioner.”
The parliamentary commissioner can remove a person from the register if it is determined that the person has, among other things, died; is deemed to be suffering from a legal incapacity and is not entitled to be registered as a voter or to vote at any election; is found not to be entitled to register as a voter or to be retained on the register of voters upon a revision of the register; or has had an objection to his registration as a voter.
The bill allows biometric voters’ cards to be issued in place of the traditional paper voter cards and counterfoils.
“The bill also seeks to allow registered voters who are 65 years and older on the day appointed for the taking of the poll, to vote as special voters in the advanced poll,” the bill says.
The creation of a continuous voters’ register has caused some to speculate Prime Minister Dr Hubert Minnis will call an election before May 2022, imitating some of his counterparts around the Caribbean who called elections this year during the COVID-19 pandemic crisis.
Dr Minnis sought to temper such speculation last month.
Speaking to reporters on the sidelines of a Small Business Development Centre grant presentation at Gladstone Road Freight Terminal last month, Dr Minnis said: “Election is due on, I think, May 2022. That’s why I know, so ‘the’ election is not due until May 2022. So, they can talk whatever they want to, that’s when it is due.”
In September, he told reporters he was committed to saving lives and restoring the economy amid the pandemic and was not focused on an early election.
Comments
DDK 3 years, 4 months ago
Of all people to table the bill, sensible or not, coming from this politician just gives me the willies.....
tribanon 3 years, 4 months ago
Even someone with a pea-size brain knows the current register of voters is totally out-of-date and rife with errors including many of the very deliberate kind. Therefore it should be thoroughly updated and cleaned-up, or completely discarded, and a new one created based on appropriate evidentiary material gathered directly from eligible voters before enacting a new Parliamentary Elections (Amendment) Bill along the lines proposed.
The new pre-legislation register needed should not be populated using other government data bases for things like births, deaths, issued drivers' licenses, passports, etc. because many of those databases are also rife with errors. And only eligible voters who have given their express written consent to be listed in the new register should be listed in it.
As for the idea of bio-metric voters' cards, just throw that one out of the window. The last thing we need is an electronic voting system whereby our register of voters is somehow created and maintained online, i.e. in anyway connected to the internet, for the purpose of later being checked against bio-metric voting cards during an election. That would make it all too easy for expert hackers in Beijing controlled by the Communist Chinese Party to create fake entries in the register that correspond to fake bio-metric cards also created by them as a means of hijacking our election process to favour whomever they want to win. And of course we all know just how dated and unsecure most of the computer systems are throughout our government. I suspect bad state actors like the Communist Chinese Party have already hacked and/or created back-door means by which they can gain access to many of our government's most confidential computer systems.
In fact, the more I think about, paper voting cards, thumbs dipped in indelible ink and paper voting ballots dropped in a secure box under the watchful eyes of election observers from the interested parties may be the only means by which our country can maintain the necessary security over the integrity of the voting process come election time. Perhaps this explains why so many countries still employ these time tested and honoured voting practices even in today's electronic age.
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