Electoral Reform Secretariat
Church Street
Basseterre
St. Kitts


VOTER IRREGULARITIES A CONCERN IN CONSULTATIONS, IN OTHER ELECTORAL SYSTEMS

Basseterre, St. Kitts (September 7, 2006): The Electoral Reform Consultative Committee Town Hall Meetings are underway, and Kittitians and Nevisians who are voicing their concerns to the Electoral Reform Consultative Committee (ERCC) at the public consultations for the National Electoral Reform Exercise are raising a number of salient points related to voter registration irregularities.

As acknowledged in the Report of the Commonwealth Assessment Mission on Electoral Reform in St. Kitts and Nevis, most complaints about electoral systems stem from the state of the voters’ list and this applies in St. Kitts and Nevis, too.

Wilfred Welch was the first attendee to speak on the first night of the public consultations on Monday, September 4. “Voters must be made to register in the constituency where they live, meaning the place where they will call home for transacting all or most of their business transactions. This is fundamental, Mr. Chairman, if in fact there will be changes to the boundaries, and it is also important because the constituency representatives must have an obligation to their constituencies, and by extension to their constituents,” he suggested. Mr. Welch also called for a periodic review of the voters’ list. “This exercise should be jointly supervised by members of the Electoral Office and by an independent person or group, acting together.”

One complaint about the voters’ list in St. Kitts and Nevis has to do with the number of dead people on it. The Federation – as well as other electoral systems – is struggling to find ways to purge the deceased from its registers.

At the first Town Hall Meeting, which was held at the Basseterre Senior High School Auditorium on Monday night, attendee Earl Clarke addressed the Electoral Reform Consultative Committee (ERCC) Chairman, Elvis Newton, saying “as it stands now, our voters’ list is filled with a lot of people who are dead and there is great difficulty in wiping off the names of those people.” Mr. Clarke added, “I hope that our new registration system would clean up the list and make it more democratic for people to vote.”

Since the electoral system was last reformed between 1983 and 1984, St. Kitts and Nevis has implemented a continuous voter registration system, which allows for people to go into an electoral office and register on a rolling basis. However, Mr. Clarke recommends that St. Kitts and Nevis revert to the system of conducting door-to-door voter registration, which he thinks is a fairly effective method of ascertaining deaths in the household.

In an interview today Mr. Clarke said, “If you can get the Registrar of Deaths to verify that these people are dead then it would be much better” to ascertain whether someone on the voters’ list truly belongs there.

The Electoral Office in St. Kitts and Nevis does not have an established partnership with agencies that provide vital statistics information, such as the Registry of Births, Deaths, and Marriages.

"When a person dies, we get the cause of death, which is issued by the doctor," says Vivette Brownbill, Deputy Registrar General, "and then we issue a death certificate. So all the deaths in both St. Kitts and Nevis are registered at the Registrar General's office." Ms. Brownbill adds that, "The only problem that one might have is that some people carry a different name," which can impede the verification process.

The Deputy Registrar General points out that the Registry’s records are not computerized. She adds that the Organization of American States (OAS) is working with the Registrar General's office to establish a computerized system by the year 2007. Perhaps the Electoral Office would be able to access such a system to facilitate the updating of the voters’ list.

In Barbados, the Registry of Births, Deaths, and Marriages sends information about deaths to the electoral office, says Spencer Amory, Assistant Secretary in the St. Kitts and Nevis Electoral Office.

Elections Canada – an independent agency that reports directly to Canada’s Parliament – updates the Canadian Register using a number of sources, such as tax forms from Canada Customs and Revenue Agency, Citizenship and Immigration, provincial electoral agencies, vehicle registrars, and vital statistics agencies.

But municipalities in the Canadian province of Ontario cannot avail themselves of information from vital statistics agencies due to privacy laws enacted by Ontario’s Municipal Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act of 1991. [For instance, the city of Mississauga in the Greater Toronto Area is a municipality of Ontario.] So although Elections Canada found more than 90,000 dead people on municipal voters’ lists in Ontario late last year, months after this discovery the deceased remain on the list.

This is due to the fact that since the Act passed in 1991, the Ministry of Government Services responsible for compiling vital statistics, such as deaths, has not been sharing information freely with Ontario’s Municipal Property Assessment Corp. (MPAC), the agency charged with assembling the municipal voters’ lists. Thus when MPAC shared its voters’ lists with Elections Canada late last year, Elections Canada was allowed to disclose to MPAC its findings that 90,000 deceased people are on the municipal voters’ lists in Ontario, but it could not release the names of the dead.

Dead people are also on the voter rolls in the United States. When John Samples, Director of the Center for Representative Government at the Cato Institute testified on March 14, 2001 before the Committee on Rules and Administration in the U.S. Senate, he said that “a recent study in Georgia found more than 15,000 dead people on active voting rolls statewide.”

Highlighting other voter registration irregularities, he testified that, “Alaska, according to Federal Election Commission, had 502,968 names on its voter rolls in 1998. The census estimates only 437,000 people of voting age were living in the state that year.

“Similar studies in other states would no doubt return similar data,” Mr. Samples added.

According to the Report of the Commonwealth Assessment Mission on Electoral Reform in St. Kitts and Nevis, “The current population of St. Kitts and Nevis is approximately 38,836 and the voters’ list as of May 2005 stood at 38,388. The voters’ list for the 2004 election was 38,865.”

Besides irregularities in the voters’ list, participants in the public consultations have touched on what they consider to be appropriate forms of voter identification. The issue of whether to endow a “smart card” with biometric features, such as a fingerprint, has been heavily discussed, as well as the impact that St. Kitts and Nevis Nationals living abroad have on the electoral system, and whether there should be residency requirements for voting. Participants have also forwarded suggestions to the Electoral Reform Consultative Committee (ERCC) on campaign finance reform; access to the media; proportional representation; changes to boundaries and constituencies, and young people’s role in the reformation process.

Consultations continue tonight at Bronte Welch primary school and Dieppe Bay primary school between 7:30pm and 9:30pm. The former venue is for Challenger’s/Boyd’s/West Farm public consultations and the latter is for Dieppe Bay and Parson’s. Young people are invited to attend a consultation at Bambu’s on Bank Street at 7:30pm.




Contact: Valencia Grant (869-762-6177)