#BTColumn – Historical election results analysed

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the author(s) do not represent the official position of Barbados TODAY. 

by David Brathwaite

I believe it is important for all Barbadians to have a clear understanding of our historical election results as the basis of any analysis and discussion on the subject.

Sometimes the raw numbers paint a clearer picture for the lay person than sophisticated statistical analyses which they may not understand. They need to study and digest the unpolished data, which they can research for themselves, so they can draw their own conclusions.

I have therefore created the table below that shows the general election results from 1966 to 2022 to aid the discussion. The basic information was obtained from the website caribbeanelections.com published by Knowledge Walk Institute – http://www.caribbeanelections.com/elections/ bb_elections.asp © 2008-2019 – which I accessed on January 26, 2022, in addition to the published results of the just concluded 2022 general election.

However, any derived information, analysis and conclusions are entirely my own and any errors are attributable to me.
The most salient point to note is that the 2018 election was extraordinary because of the strong motivation of the electorate to remove the Fruendel Stuart administration.

It is therefore not expected that a normal election would yield comparable results to those of 2018.

For this reason, the outcome for that year should be excluded from the analysis of “normal” elections; and I have calculated the averages based on data for the years 1966 to 2013 and excluded 2018.

Nonetheless, in absolute terms, the 153,745 votes cast in 2018 were the highest number of votes cast in any single election in our history, even though, conversely, the turnout percentage was 60.10 per cent: the lowest in our history up to that time.

Obviously, we have a major problem with a bloated voters’ list, and we should therefore be most wary of quoting voting turnout percentages.

It certainly is not reasonable that the actual living and present electors in Barbados would have more than doubled between 1971 and 2022, from 115,189 to 266,330, despite the changes in the structure of the population over time.

Furthermore, approximately 3,500 children take the Common Entrance Examination each year, so if we multiply that number by 18, we get around 63,000 children from zero to eighteen years old who cannot vote.

Then we have all the residents and immigrants that are either not registered or not entitled to vote.
These include Commonwealth citizens with residency status who have not registered to vote, Commonwealth citizens without residency, non-Commonwealth citizens and undocumented immigrants (who are counted in our population statistics.) Given our current population of approximately 288,000, the number of 266,300 registered voters on the voters list is incomprehensible.

As millennials say, “The math is not mathing; make it make sense!” More substantively, on average, both the Barbados Labour Party (BLP) and the Democratic Labour Party (DLP) have historically received around 61,000 votes per election between 1966 and 2013, with the DLP’s average being slightly higher than the BLP’s.

Ignoring the outlier year, 2018, the high point for the DLP was in 1986 when it received 80,050 votes or 59.46 per cent of the votes cast and took 24 of the 27 seats in the House of Assembly.

Shockingly, in 2022, which should have been a return to a normal election, the DEMs declined by nearly 50,000 votes from that high water mark and was also about 31,000 below their historical average.

Alarmingly, they even got 3,712 less votes than in the exceptional 2018 debacle. On the other hand, the Barbados Labour Party’s high point prior to 2018 was in 1999 when they received 63.47 per cent of the votes cast or 83,445 votes and captured 26 of the 28 seats in Parliament.

In 2022, they declined from their 1999 high point by a mere 4,700 votes but improved over their historical average by around 18,000 votes.

Their total votes in 2022 was the second highest total they received in our post-independence history, outside of the astonishing 2018 numbers.

This was achieved with what was clearly the lowest voter turnout in our election history – a truly remarkable accomplishment by any measure. In summary, the decline of the Democratic Labour Party is precipitous, and its future is obviously in doubt.

The low turnout at the polls in 2018 and 2022 is directly attributable to the nonparticipation of the DLP supporters, who seem ripe for the taking by a savvy third party.

The BLP got their supporters out on both occasions while the DLP simply did not.

Unfortunately for them and for Barbados, both the leaders and members of the Democratic Labour Party seem to listen only to themselves and refuse to recognise the depths of the problems they face.

How else can one explain the many gaffes and blunders that characterised their recent election campaign or the deferral of the leadership issue until April? What thought pattern guides their insistence that the President steps into party politics to offer the DLP two opposition seats in the Senate, when the most logical approach, as suggested by Prime Minister Mottley, is to fix permanently the Constitutional flaw in Section 75 that could drag the President into the depths of inter-party and intraparty politics and could exclude such a mass-based institution as the DLP from Parliament, simply because it won no seats in the Lower House? I can only hope that the DLP can find its way back, because Barbados cannot afford to lose the party founded by the Father of Our Independence.

This column was offered as a Letter to the Editor.