FORMER Director of Elections Danville Walker says while the electoral system is a far cry from the shambles it was when he took over its management nearly two decades ago, there are still avenues for corruption to take place in the voting process.

Describing it as a new game, Walker said a major challenge in the electoral system is with the enumeration process.

“I want to put it this way, there is a game afoot and the game is more sophisticated and it lies in enumeration,” said Walker, who is now the managing director of the Jamaica Observer.

According to Walker, people are sometimes enumerated in constituencies where they do not reside.

“So if I have a huge number of votes that I win by in a neighbouring constituency, the game is to move those supporters from that constituency to where I need them and to manipulate the verification system so that I have an advantage on election day and that is the nature of the beast,” he said.

The system, according to Walker, depends on the political parties protecting their own interests. “The system we have right now is, you pay your scrutineers from the JLP (Jamaica Labour Party) and those from the PNP (People’s National Party) and you depend on them to go out and verify that these individuals live there.

But Walker said he does not believe this system is necessarily the best way to do it.

“Jamaicans have a way of saying ‘tief nuh like see tief wid long bag’ and that system is kind of shrouded in that you allow the JLP to do it and the JLP will allow the PNP to do it. You know what it really does? It protects the electoral system from criticism… because I have sort of shut you up by allowing you to appoint someone to go and check it and I have appointed your opponent to check on you; so neither of you can effectively criticise me but it doesn’t mean I got the job done,” he said.

While he will not say with any certainty that these incidents will not recur, Walker believes the strides made have helped to nip some of these ill practices in the bud.

Walker said his entry into the electoral system in 1997 confirmed that the perception held by many was, unfortunately, a reality as the system was riddled with “exceptions and corruptions”.

“People were voting in people’s names and there were fictitious people on the voters’ list so the problem had to be addressed from two sides,” he explained. “Prior to my going to the EOJ (Electoral office of Jamaica), voters’ lists were published literally the day of the election. So, you would be in the polling station and a voters list would be delivered and you are told these are some new names that have been put on the list and those persons were now able to vote,” he said.

The issue of vote buying, Walker said, is another corrupt act that has always played a role in the election outcomes.

“Because our system sees some of the poorer people in the society supporting the process, they are susceptible to bribery. I am seeing articles now where people are talking about selling their votes for $10,000. As director of elections I have seen [where] entire polling stations were bought out. I could name them. Meaning the presiding officer was bought out, the indoor agent from one side of the political system was bought out, the poll clerk from another side was bought out, meaning they were paid to look the other way. So, anytime you believe that money is not playing that role in our election you are fooling yourself.”

As to how this may be addressed, Walker said the only solution is to make it extremely difficult for the purchaser of the vote to be able to verify they are getting what they paid for.

“The best the electoral office will ever be able to deliver is to use the secrecy of the ballot to make the payer doubt whether he is actually getting value for money. That is probably the greatest deterrent to people paying for votes,” he reasoned.

Meanwhile, Walker said there were two key legal provisions which helped to arm the electoral system with the opportunity to reform itself and that is the ability to void or to halt an election.

“Prior to that, no matter what corruption you visited upon the electoral system, it took the electoral system five years literally to legally address it through the Election Petition Act. So you would serve your entire time in parliament and get ready for a new election and then those cases would just fall by the way,” he said.

He argued that candidates are rarely sanctioned, and this meant that some would “get away with murder”.

“You could steal an election and be seated and benefit from it and that would encourage more theft,” he said.

His first task as director of elections, therefore, was a systematic and comprehensive review of procedures to determine where the corruption was and address same.

But cleaning up the system was not without teething pains as Walker said he had only six months before his first election to get things right, or as close to it as possible.

“From the very first day I walked into the electoral system, in the middle of a full house-to-house enumeration exercise, the electoral office ran out of forms in the field and we were being accused of doing so intentionally so as to subvert the enumeration process,” he disclosed.

Added to that, he was tasked with the installation of a new electoral registration system to capture fingerprints as biometric data to produce a clean voters’ list.

To say the process was chaotic was an understatement as Walker said the enumeration programme, which was to have been completed by that June, was not completed until close to the end of August and the voters’ list was still not ready by the first week of November.

It also didn’t help that there was a great clamour by the government of the day to have an election.

“The Opposition did not want an election and so you are kind of caught in a vortex of not being ready when it is your mandate to be ready to hold the election whenever. It wasn’t even about the funds; we were in the middle of the installation of a new system with all its usual types of problems and the system wasn’t working and every time you promised something and you didn’t deliver it was seen with suspicion on the Opposition side and incompetence on the Government side,” he explained.

Despite the challenges, which included near abandonment of the biometric data and the late opening of polling stations, Walker said it was a far improvement from what existed before.

“When I compared that election to the historical record of what took place in election in Jamaica before that, I would say without any doubt it was the best election up until that time. For one, we had no surprise lists turning up at the polling stations, the workers were better trained than in previous elections and more stations opened on time than during previous elections even though many of them opened late,” he said.

According to Walker, it was the previous state of the electoral process which forced the country to invest in the biometric data to clean up the system.

“I think the government recognised that we were staring at an abyss. The elections were so corrupt that it could actually threaten the viability of your ability to govern. And it wasn’t just altruism. The wisdom of it is that it would affect your ability to legitimately call yourself the Government of Jamaica,” he said. “You had constituencies that had 26,000 people on the voters’ list in 1993 and when you started taking fingerprints they had fewer than 18,000 people on the voters’ list afterwards, so where did the 8,000 bogus names go? You could register any name there were so many… who would literally make up names and put them on the voters’ list and see to it that people voted in those names. That was how corrupt the system was.”

And although Walker gave the election preparedness process only a ‘C’, he said it accomplished, in part, one of its major tasks which was to keep away the political influence from the process.

“The political system will corrupt the electoral process. They will steal the election if they can. There is no qualm,” Walker said. “Any politician I met when I was director of elections I felt that, given an opportunity, they would steal the election. I even asked them: ‘Do you believe in free and fair elections?’ And, probably the most honest answer I got came from a general secretary of one of the parties [which] was ‘It depends which day you ask me. I intend to win so you can sort it out afterwards because that is your job’,” he shared.

And, while not saying the system will revert to these severe corrupt practices, Walker believes there has been some slippage over the years.

Noting that the game is always changing, Walker said the electoral office has to be vigilant.

“The issues you faced when I was director of elections, you are going to face different issues now, and the political system is going to adjust to seek any advantage it had before; so the type of corruption you had when I was there it is going to present itself differently, and what the electoral system has to do is constantly adjust with it,” he said.