Electoral Reform Secretariat
Church Street
Basseterre
St. Kitts


ERCC HEARS NEW SUGGESTIONS FROM PRESENTERS AT THE CAYON COMMUNITY CENTRE

Basseterre, St. Kitts (October 6, 2006): What if St. Kitts and Nevis compiled a special list of registered citizens residing overseas, enabling the Federation to gauge the influence that Nationals abroad have over its elections?

If it were up to Sharon Herbert this scenario would be more than a hypothetical.

Wednesday night was the first time that the Electoral Reform Consultative Committee (ERCC) heard this recommendation from a presenter in the consultations. It came exactly one month into the consultative process for the St. Kitts and Nevis Electoral Reform Exercise at the Community Centre in Cayon. ERCC members Elvis Newton (Chair), Clive Bacchus, Clifford Thomas, Douglas Wattley, and Clement “Bouncin” Williams conducted the Town Hall Meeting.

Ms. Herbert explained that, “At least we can actually go back and see at the end when we’re evaluating the election process. We can see the percentage of votes that comes and really rationalize how effective our measures were afterwards.” She continued, “At the end of the day, we’re still looking at a view that persons overseas may have interests in the community or the society but then they aren’t impacted directly by the issues that are in our country. Therefore their views may be different to ours. So then we want to see at the end of the day what their influence is on our election process.”

Mr. Wattley said, “These consultations are very interesting because bar none every time we have a consultation a new concept comes up. This is the first time I’ve heard this one.” He added, “Essentially, what it sounds like is that you would then be able to determine whether or not overseas voters decided an election. That’s the first time I’ve heard that one; quite interesting.”

Other people expressed suggestions concerning overseas voters’ right to vote, which is one of the pre-eminent and polarizing issues in the electoral reform process.

Solomon Morton said, “I am convinced that overseas voters or citizens of this Federation who reside overseas have the right to vote in any election, whether we are going to use absentee ballots or we are going to allow them to come home and vote. We should not take away the franchise of our citizens.”

Brenda Burroughs said that a residency requirement for overseas voters should be “looked at.” Then Ms. Burroughs asked the ERCC members, “What is the experience of other Caribbean islands...how do they treat persons who reside abroad?”

“Just today we learnt that Montserrat doesn’t allow their citizens who are living overseas to vote,” replied Mr. Wattley. Chairman Newton added, “In Antigua and Barbuda, for example, there must be a residency period for Nationals of Antigua to participate in the election. In St. Lucia...your name is removed from the list, once you are resident outside of St. Lucia. So there are various combinations.”

Ms. Borroughs said that she thinks the eligibility of citizens abroad should be contingent on whether they have a vested interest, such as investments in St. Kitts and Nevis.

Auden Allen asserted that the votes of people living in St. Kitts and Nevis should be worth more than those people who have been away for 40 years. This assertion mirrored a point that Ms. Herbert had raised earlier. She said that someone who resides in St. Kitts-Nevis for a year, for example, a Commonwealth citizen, would be influenced by the community and culture, so - in her opinion - that person’s vote should count more than an ancestral voter, who she says probably knows very little about the country.

“If you’re going to have the overseas voter coming in to vote,” said Telca Wallace, “because they have a right to vote, they send money into the country, they support their families and so on, they have homes here, they pay taxes, and they have money in the banks where we go and borrow, so they help in the development of this country and so there should be some provision made to have them factored into these electoral boundaries.”

A woman’s worth was also a focus of Ms. Wallace’s presentation. She affirmed that women should have a key role to play in a democratic society. “As we know, women hold up our households, our communities, and our nation. So, we should factor the gender balance into it, where women are given a more lead role to play in the electoral process.”

In fact, the Report of the Commonwealth Assessment Mission for Electoral Reform in St. Kitts and Nevis identified “Gender Balance” as one of the issues that has “affected the run-up to and conduct of the elections in St. Kitts and Nevis.” The document reports that, “During its consultations the Mission heard that many women in St. Kitts and Nevis feel intimidated in a political environment and are reluctant to enter the political scene, mainly through fear of discrimination against themselves and their families and the use of gender-biased rhetoric on political platforms aimed at denigration and ridicule.”

When a group of young professionals met last month at the Sugar Bay Club to discuss, among other things, the public conduct of politicians, a member of Project Viola, an organization of teenage mothers, raised a thought-provoking point. She said that if someone who had been a teenage mother ran for political office in St. Kitts and Nevis, male politicians would almost certainly disparage her in the public realm for that fact. Moreover, the females in the group - who have all made great strides professionally in such fields as business, engineering, journalism, psychology, and sociology - expressed surprise and even dismay that at least two of the young professional men at the discussion said that such a tactic would be fair game and that it does indeed matter whether a political candidate had been a teenage mother.

The Report continues: “Each of the main political parties in St. Kitts fielded only one woman candidate each in a slate of eight in the last election, both of whom (one being an incumbent) did not win in their constituencies. The involvement of women in the staffing of polling stations and the turnout of women voters is, however, high.” Furthermore, one of the eight recommendations outlined in the report states that there is a need to enhance the participation of women in St. Kitts and Nevis politics.

People at the public consultation in Cayon felt that there is a need to increase also the involvement of the media in St. Kitts and Nevis politics, so long as they participate responsibly and facilitate a free and fair election.

“I have a concern over the media,” said Mr. Morton, “and I want to take this opportunity to raise it. I’m of the opinion that the media houses in St. Kitts-Nevis need to get on board, and whenever there is a treaty between political parties or leaders of parties the media should be involved in signing it to keep the politics fair, clean, and decent.” He said that there are too many instances of political parties and agents using the media for “pulling down a party, pulling down an individual.” Mr. Morton issued this caveat: “We have to recognize that the media is no longer just serving the community of St. Kitts-Nevis, but it is international. People on the Web listen all over, and when we slander and pull down we still have to go and rebuild.”

Jedroy Percival felt that the state media should provide free access, whereas Solomon Morton felt that “giving free time to any political party should be slashed.” Auden Allen suggested that the media ought to televise the count live.

Schneidman Warner recommended that political parties should have free access to state owned and privately owned media. Mr. Warner suggested that the Electoral Commission should formulate guidelines to determine what would be a “reasonable” amount of time that a political party could procure in utilizing the media for the benefit of its campaign. “If in addition to that free time granted on the airwaves a party wants to spend money on their own, that party would be free to do it, but no party should be excluded from the airwaves because they could not afford to spend money to go on the media,” he said.

Mr. Warner also suggested that there should be some mechanism put in place to ensure that the voters’ list takes into account the deaths of non-resident Nationals abroad, and that these dead people’s names should be removed from the list periodically

Attendees also recommended that there should be an independent report commissioned to draw out the expertise of a boundaries expert from outside of St. Kitts and Nevis; the boundaries situation should be considered from a geographical perspective because other factors such as numbers are more apt to shift over time; there should be campaign finance reform, and there should be a new enumeration exercise, a new voters’ list, and a voters’ I.D. with a photo and a fingerprint.

In wrapping up the meeting, Douglas Wattley remarked that the presenters in Cayon contributed some new ideas to the process, and Clive Bacchus characterized the suggestion for a separate overseas Nationals’ list as “very innovative.”




Contact: Valencia Grant (869-762-6177)