DESPITE a gang-related fatal shooting at a Jamaica Labour Party rally on the eve of the polls, voting in Central Westmoreland was quiet yesterday.

Soldiers stood guard at polling stations in Savanna-la-Mar as a result of the incident, allegedly an attempt to murder the leader of the Hot Roses gang by members of the Pobo gang. Security in the rest of the sprawling constituency was provided by the police.

Former People’s National Party agriculture minister Roger Clarke confidently predicted just before the close of voting that he would increase his margin of victory to 3,000 votes from the 1,800 in 2007.

The local PNP organisation was divided after a bitter nomination battle when he parachuted in four years ago, he said. “It took time for the wounds to heal.”

At Clarke’s orange-and-black headquarters on Rose Street in Savanna-la-Mar, election workers were tallying reports from the polling stations and helping citizens who were having trouble voting, while Clarke held court in a back room.

As the polls closed, the wall charts gave him a commanding lead over his rival, Marlene Malahoo-Forte of the Jamaica Labour Party. Those figures were not reliable, however, as they were based on canvassing results by PNP poll workers just before election day.

Malahoo-Forte’s headquarters on the road to Negril was far quieter, with only two workers evident in the office and a handful of supporters in the shade of a tree outside.

Malahoo-Forte said by phone that she was keeping a low profile yesterday, venturing out to polling stations only to deal with “minor” infractions such as a case of voter intimidation. “I was met with a lot of bad words from the other side,” she said.

Both candidates said the top local issue was infrastructure, followed by unemployment.

But one woman who identified herself only as Valerie wanted the PNP to lose because of the pro-homosexuality stance taken by its leader, Portia Simpson Miller. “People don’t like that,” she said, describing herself as a “handicapped street girl”.

A local real estate agent, meanwhile, wanted Simpson Miller to win “because the economy was so bad”.

Clarke, the largest cane farmer in St Elizabeth, claimed that Central Westmoreland had been victimised by the JLP Government of the past four years, while trumpetting cases where he had brought home the bacon.

When asked about the PNP’s record of economic management during its eighteen-and-a-half years in power — when it averaged less than one per cent gross domestic product growth despite a global boom, he pointed to the many natural disasters that it had to deal with. “We had catastrophes almost every single year,” he said. “This government has not experienced that.”