‘Provisions for special voting needed’

Election regulators are recommending the enactment of new legislation to make provisions for voting in special circumstances.

Chief Electoral Officer Angela Taylor said the need for such legislation was one of the main lessons from Wednesday’s general elections, in which the eligible voters among the more than 5,000 Barbadians in isolation with COVID-19 , were disenfranchised due to directives prohibiting infected persons in quarantine and isolation from leaving their places to vote.

“What I would say is that what we can learn from this is that we need to look at other methods of voting because of the pandemic situation,” Taylor told Barbados TODAY.

“We need to perhaps consider and make provision in law for other methods of voting that can be deployed in special circumstances.”

Two days before the general elections, Chairman of the Electoral and Boundaries Commission (EBC) Leslie Haynes, Q.C. stressed that the agency was “bound by the law” and COVID-19-positive persons in isolation could not vote since the COVID-19 directive under the Emergency Management Act prohibits those persons from leaving isolation for any reason.

The exclusion of these persons was the basis of legal action taken by Philip Nathanial Catlyn of the Barbados Sovereign Party. He unsuccessfully filed an injunction to stop the general election on the grounds that COVID-19 patients were being denied their constitutional right to vote.

A night before the elections, High Court Judge Justice Cicely Chase ruled that the court had no jurisdiction to hear the injunction.

Meantime, in her assessment of the conduct of Wednesday’s poll, Taylor reported that the elections generally went well.

“The sanitisation and the COVID-19 protocols were well done. That was actually better than some of the regular voting part of the processing. There were a few situations of people not finding their names on the register, notwithstanding that we started to advertise very early for persons to check the register,” the Supervisor of Elections stated.

Taylor said people were urged to examine the register to ensure they were on the list of electors and to inform the Electoral Department if they had changed their addresses.

“There were still the last-minute people who were going to check but … for some reason or another, they may not have found their names on the register. Those were just a few. But I think overall it went well and without incident at the polling stations,” she reported.

Taylor also gave an update on the planned re-registration of the local population and issuing of new national identification cards which she had promised would take place after the general election.

“I think that we will know [the start] on Monday. We generally have a steering committee meeting on Monday, so they were giving us time to complete the election. As soon as we have the first meeting and a date is given or some indication the date is given, I will let you know,” she told Barbados TODAY.

Last week, she told this media house the re-registration exercise would allow electoral officials to have a more accurate register of electors.
emmanueljoseph@barbadostoday.bb