The Tribune

SOMETIMES the smallest things catch you off guard, jolting and startling you into seeing something you thought of as normal with fresh eyes.

One of those incidents occurred this week.

It just so happened that election day and school pickup occurred on the same day. I parked, walked up to my 4-year-old grandson’s class. The classroom door was open, he saw me and grinned (there’s always the chance that when I pick him up he gets to go to Menchie’s). He walked out and reached for my right hand as usual and suddenly his entire demeanor did a 180. His warm brown eyes popped open so large they looked like they were going to jump out of his head. He was staring at my thumb in shock. You’d have thought he had seen a horde of ghosts on horseback.

“What happened? What did you do? Does it hurt?” he rambled on, one long unbroken sentence with question marks at the end of every thought. “No, not that hand, no,” he announced, rejecting the hand he normally grabs and walking around to my left. I could not tell if he was more concerned about whatever agony I must be suffering or if he were just protecting himself from the creepy thing that attacked my thumb and turned it black.

Until that moment when he refused to hold my hand in case it was contagious, I had not stopped to think about how barbaric dipping your finger into a tub of ink that is almost impossible to get off was. In the past, I had worn that black thumb as a badge of honour. Look, I voted, it shouted to whomever happened to notice.

The black ink syndrome is only one of a number of reminders that it may be time to hit a reset button on how we vote. What follows is not a criticism of how the voting went – I was in and out in five minutes. Kudos for the organization at St. Anne’s.

This is deeper and far more significant than black ink.

It begins with looking honestly at why voter turn-out was so low, how to change that, and how to include those thousands – possibly tens of thousands – of students and others who live or study abroad and who are--for all practical purposes--disenfranchised.

A 58 percent voter turnout for national elections to determine how the country is going to be governed for the next four and a half or five years is not acceptable.

Fifty eight percent of anything is only a little over half good.

If we picked up our cell phones and they only worked 58 percent of the time, we would be furious. We would throw them away and look for a better way to communicate. If our car only started 58 percent of the time, we’d be looking for a new vehicle, or at the very least, a better mechanic. If physicians only diagnosed medical issues correctly or surgeons only performed delicate surgeries successfully 58 percent of the time, we would demand that their medical licences be pulled.

So we can all pat each other on the back and say we did a great job with the national elections because, unlike the early election, the process went relatively smoothly.

We could, but we would be lying to ourselves.

The process was successful, but the voter turnout was not. So we have to ask ourselves why, and, more importantly, what we can do to change it.

It’s not the black thumb that’s the rub, it’s the black eye we suffer as a nation where nearly half the eligible voters feel so disenfranchised, so ignored, so unheard that they don’t even bother to go to the polls. There are really two issues – those who want to vote but find the challenges too great, including those living abroad, and those who choose not to vote.

Like this man, who I asked about it.

“They’re all the same,” said a close friend who is well-educated, well-connected, and active in the community. I was surprised he chose not to vote. “People donate to the campaigns, not for the love of a candidate. They expect something in return. In the end, it’s all family, friends, and lovers, and they’re all the same. So if I vote, I am the fool for perpetuating that syndrome. If it ever changes, I will start voting again, but it won’t change.”

How sad, I thought, how very sad. He is too discouraged to cast a ballot. How many others feel as he does? He used to vote, he said. When did it change? Was it when the referendum regarding gaming was ignored and subsequently labelled a straw vote? Was it a combination of a series of actions or inaction, bold promises made that could not be or were not fulfilled.

Campaign finance reform, as the Organization for Responsible Governance continually calls for, would ease the concerns of many, including the man who once stood proudly at Clifford Park on the night of July 10, 1973 as the Union Jack came down and the Bahamian flag was raised, shouting, celebrating, with tears filling his eyes, but who no longer votes.

Beyond campaign finance rules establishing limits to donations and transparency about who donates, we have to ask ourselves – are we really proud that whoever throws the biggest party wins? We love the rallies. No one is suggesting that they be cancelled. But what about what comes after? So citizens don’t feel that if the money that was spent on tents and entertainment and giveaways had been invested in PMH there would be fewer deaths, including those who die on a gurney waiting to be seen?

The world has moved on from the days of dipping fingers into ink. Blockchain technology, online voting with guardrails, mail-in ballots can easily be implemented to remove the unnecessary barriers to voting and increase the numbers of those who can participate wherever they are.

Maybe my grandson was on to something – being frightened by a darkened thumb. The election process is bruised. But the good news is it’s not beyond repair. It can be healed with relatively little difficulty. Many of us would be happy to volunteer to make it happen. The Davis administration, given a second term by an overwhelming majority of voters, has a golden opportunity to reset the national elections process in The Bahamas, and cure one of the last remaining vestiges of a world we should have outgrown a long time ago.

Maybe we had to hit that all-time voting turnout low to wake us up, rub the sleep out of our eyes and look for a better way forward where all of us feel part of what makes all of us Bahamian.