VOTING MACHINES AND THE HOSTING OF LOCAL GOVERNMENT ELECTIONS

Mar 24, 2014 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

If a poll were conducted today, it may very well find that the vast majority does not understand the new system of Local Government Elections. The system used in 1994 has been reformed and a new system, over which there were years of haggling between the PPP and the PNCR, has been put in place.
No elections have ever been held under this new system. Indeed no Local Government Elections have been held in close to twenty years. As such, not just is the electorate under-informed about the new system but many voters would never have voted in a Local Government Election.
Representative politics is not just about the people ritualistically voting every four or five years. The basis of that system is that voters must be informed. They must know just what they are voting for and the system under which they are voting.
They must be aware of any changes to the electoral system. Voting in Georgetown, for example, is no longer just about voting for a party. The Municipality is now divided up into specific constituencies and voters will be voting for both their party and for representatives in each of the constituencies. How many voters know what are the constituencies and their boundaries?
While Local Government Elections need to be held, they will be far from democratic if the electorate cannot make informed choices. They need to know who they are voting for and how the system works. They also need to know what to do when they enter into a Polling Station. The respective candidates also need to be given the opportunity, far more than one month before elections, to become acquainted within their constituencies, more so since some constituencies constitute more than one ward.
Local Government Elections may also be a good time to introduce to Guyana, voting machines. These machines have been successfully used in other countries, including Venezuela and will avoid having votes to be manually counted and for all those observers at Polling Stations. The Local Government Elections would be a good time to introduce these machines on a very small scale, say in certain neighborhood constituencies where there is not likely to be close competition for votes. Here again some amount of public education will be needed.
The price for ensuring an informed electorate will be delays. But judging from the controversy that our election results generate, it is a price that has to be paid. Voting machines can be one way of improving the efficiency of the counting and declaring of results.
But voting machines because they are new will also attract its fair share of suspicion. This is why these machines should be first used at the internal Congress elections of the various political parties.
At the last Congress held by the PNCR, the results were kept a secret for a long time. A veil of secrecy in fact hung over the whole process which went late into the night. Why it took so long for the main opposition party to count, tabulate and to declare the votes cast is still a mystery? The PPP has a more tedious process because each of their delegates has to vote for over thirty persons. They got their results out quicker but in both cases the elections took up an entire day of a Congress. If it could have been run off quicker through the use of voter machines, there would have been more time for deliberations by the delegates, which is really an important aspect of all party Congresses.
The international community should therefore donate a few voting machines to the Guyana Elections Commission on condition that these machines be loaned to the country’s political parties for their internal elections. These machines will be able to give the results of internal party elections rapidly, ensure greater confidence in the integrity of the results, remove completely spoilt votes and thereby avoid disenfranchising anyone and be more accurate.
There is a great deal of pressure being mounted on the government to hold Local Government Elections. These elections are long overdue but so too are reforms that are needed to improve the efficiency of the vote counting, tabulation and the declaration of results.
Voting machines are the way of the future. A pilot run should be done whenever Local Government Elections are held.

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