DLP leader calls for election report

President of the Democratic Labour Party (DLP) Dr Ronnie Yearwood is questioning why eight months after Barbadians went to the polls, the official report on that general election has not yet been published.

He contended that political parties need the information contained in that report for their planning, and the Government should be pressured to have it made available.

“At this moment, if you can’t produce a report eight months after the election, something must be wrong,” charged Dr Yearwood, who was a panelist in the 12th online town hall meeting of the University of the West Indies (UWI) Faculty of Social Sciences Republicanism series, Constitutional Reform and the Republic: the Role, Functions, Legitimacy, and Capacity of Political Opposition on Sunday.

“To say there is a certain dysfunctionalism within the major organisation in Barbados tasked with managing and reporting on elections, that is not good enough and that is something that the Government should be held to task for because there is either a staffing issue, there is a financial issue, there is a competence issue.

“Whatever one of those issues, the Government has to be held to the fire to say, ‘you know what, you need to do better’. You need to do better because democracy needs to do better, because as an opposition party I need to see that report, Joseph Atherley [Leader of the Alliance Party for Progress] needs to see that report, other people who are interested in getting into electoral politics need to see that report because we need to understand the details of what happened at the election,” the DLP leader stressed.

Dr Yearwood insisted that not having that document, which is required to be laid in Parliament, hampers the strategic planning of interested parties since no one can officially verify the breakdown of votes that each side or candidate received in the polls.

“These things sometimes are not the sexiest of things. Nobody wants to discuss an Electoral and Boundaries Report or people may not be aware of the kind of intricacies of what the Electoral and Boundaries Commission is asked to do, but they’re important institutions within our constitutional and political setup and we have to pay attention to what’s happening and why they’re not functioning,” he said.

A source close to the commission who spoke to Barbados TODAY on condition of anonymity said an election report is usually returned a few weeks after the polls but the report from the January 19, 2022 vote “hasn’t even yet come to the commission for discussion”. (KC)