By Nigel Carty
It should not surprise anyone that PAM is attempting to thwart and derail the electoral reform process undertaken by the Government. From its infancy as a political party back in 1967, PAM has demonstrated its complete lack of respect for democracy. PAM has never enjoyed majority political support, has always attempted to corrupt the electoral system, and does not now want real electoral reform.
Let us not forget that PAM could not get into office on its own in 1980. To do so, it had to join forces with the NRP. And so its first priority once in office was tampering with the electoral system. By the very next elections in 1984 it had cooked up a recipe it thought would guarantee its hold on power for decades.
It was PAM that introduced a system that enabled voters, dead or alive, to have their names permanently affixed to the register of voters. It was PAM that implanted a system that enabled its friends, supporters and financiers residing overseas to fly into the country on the eve of the elections and vote on Election Day. It was PAM that engineered the legal loophole that made it possible for voters to essentially choose where they wanted to vote regardless of where they lived. PAM invented and practiced a vast array of electoral irregularities and political tricks and was able through those means to control the election outcomes in some constituencies.
Even now, PAM is desperately registering supporters in strategic constituencies, and has registered all sorts of people in constituency #4, in particular. Ongoing tensions inside the People’s Action Movement, you see, are placing great pressures on Mr. Grant to win his seat if he is to avoid being replaced as party leader. What Mr. Grant realizes, therefore, is that all his maneuverings will go down the drain when proper electoral reform is implemented. He is afraid that his political pipe dream will be dashed against the hard wall of transparent reality. ~~Adz:Right~~
Fearing the veritable and traumatic impact of electoral reform on the political fortunes of PAM and Mr. Grant, PAM has come up with a brilliant but profoundly superficial idea to derail the process. The cornerstone of the strategy is the façade that PAM really wants fingerprints on the voter identification cards. PAM is prepared to stir up confusion, call for marches and protests, and derail electoral reform. PAM is as convinced as any reasonable person is that fingerprints would delay and hurt rather than help the process. But that is exactly what PAM wants.
PAM is absolutely seized with the fact that only in Iraq, Haiti and the Philippines are fingerprints used in the electoral process. The reason fingerprints are used in Iraq is clear. With so much ethnic strife and mistrust among the Sunnis, Shias (or Sheas) and Kurds, who are motivated not so much by reason as by their very deeply-held contending religious beliefs and traditions, the only way forward in a Muslim society so deeply and irresolvably divided was a cumbersome fingerprint system.
In Haiti, at the time of their elections there had been a complete breakdown in the normal governmental structures and processes. And in the elections took place while the country was under occupation by military foreign forces. This is not the case in St. Kitts & Nevis. In Haiti, those administering the elections and those going to the polls knew very little about each other. There was no shared history. No shared culture. No sense of nationhood. They were not one people. Again, this is not the case in St. Kitts & Nevis.
If PAM really thinks that our situation here in St. Kitts and Nevis is Iraq-like or Haiti-like, they should say so. They should make the case. I think that would make for very interesting national debate.
Mr Eugene Hamilton admitted last Saturday on Winn FM that although Antigua had experimented with the fingerprint idea, it failed. Antigua undertook tremendous expense to try to put in place a fingerprint system which it never used. The operations of such a system are so logistically cumbersome and fraught with hiccups that it did not make sense. The resources to man and maintain the system and to make sure it works flawlessly on Election Day are near impossible to mobilize.
In its July 17 edition of the Democrat in an article entitled ‘Min. Astaphan Wrong About Fingerprints’, PAM shamelessly explained:
“The situation in Antigua where the Voter ID Card could not be read by the machines was a failure of technology that is easily rectified.”
The truth is, the problem has never been rectified. These technological problems are never easily overcome because they are complex. While he understood the complicatedness and the overwhelming resource requirements of his party’s fingerprint proposal, Mr. Hamilton reported on Winn FM that PAM would accept a fingerprint on a card - even if it cannot be used at all. What this demonstrates is PAM’s callous disregard for basic reason, a sense of fair play, and indeed for our country as a whole.
The most important point here, however, is that although the fingerprint was never used in Antigua’s elections, everyone from all sides, internally and externally, agree that Antigua’s elections were free and fair, free from fear, and absolutely beyond reproach.
Then, why create confusion for a fingerprint on a card if you are convinced that you do not want it to be used at all? The answer to this question is what leads any thinking citizen to the inescapable conclusion that PAM’s call for a fingerprint on a card is a trivial, abusive and self-centred political hoax.
Aside from the technological and logistical hitches associated with PAM’s fingerprint idea, there are many other challenges in convincing a populace accustomed to its freedom and innocence to accept a fingerprint-driven electoral system. Once a fingerprint is taken in a digitized format in a computer database, it can be used by virtually anybody who has access to that database, now or in the future, for a variety of purposes. What could happen if a fingerprinted identification card gets stolen or the security or integrity of the database is breached?
There are, of course, legitimate circumstances when the right people should have access to a fingerprint database. If the voting cheaters on Election Day were to be charged in a court of law, then the Police, for example, would have to get access to the database. Even police officers may have their own strong political convictions that motivate them. Who knows what else could happen if police officers, as upright as most of them are, get their hands on a database filled with all of our fingerprints?
Are we a nation of criminals that we all have to be fingerprinted for voting every five years? Why should the entire nation be fingerprinted because of a few scrubs who may want to cheat? Is this fingerprint hoax by PAM intended to scare people from registering to vote because of potential abuse and misuse of their unique fingerprint identity by God-knows-who? Shouldn’t we just apply all the guidelines outlined on page 15 of the Commonwealth report to eliminate fraud? Isn’t PAM’s cumbersome, costly and risky fingerprint proposal like a chef using a sledgehammer to break the egg?
PAM, in recognizing the potential consequences of having a national database of fingerprints, has flip-flopped on its fingerprint rhetoric and has reluctantly submitted in the same July 17 Democrat article referenced above that:
“The fingerprint information would not be a part of any national database but contained only in the card.”
~~Adz:Left~~ This recent change of heart and acquiescence by PAM altogether defeats the purpose for having a fingerprint-based electoral system in the first place. If the fingerprint is not also in a database somewhere, then what is it compared with? Itself? Well, anything compared with itself gives us a perfect match, and that, dear reader, breaks the entire system down and creates gaping loopholes in it. That essentially means that any John Doe or Juan Pepe can create his own card, put his fingerprint on it, and turn up to vote on Election Day. You see, there are commercial off-the-self (COTS) fingerprint processing systems which you can buy on the internet and use to set up your own fingerprinting operation. Large companies in particular use these systems all the time, and so can PAM.
The essence of the integrity of a fingerprint-driven voting system is that there is always an authentic copy of the voter’s fingerprint in a secure database controlled by the Electoral Authority and that the voter on election day produces a fingerprint which is compared instantaneously against that secure database for a matching record. But PAM does not want the fingerprint in a database.
Clearly, PAM is not in the business of making good commonsense on electoral reform. And from its recent waffling on its fingerprint rhetoric and its dogmatic sticking out and threats to protest on non-issues, PAM is not making good political sense either. If PAM were interested in addressing the central issue which a voter ID card is intended to resolve – voter identity – then PAM would accept the pellucid fact that a voter ID card with a photo of the voter; his/her signature; a randomly-generated, algorithmically-based, unique voter identification number that simply cannot be fabricated or guessed up (similar to a credit card number); other bio-data; and a security strip, is more than adequate to do the job. Such a card combines all the elements on which the public unanimously agreed during the consultations as cited in section 3.4 (1) of the ERCC (or Newton) report.
But PAM being PAM inevitably means that PAM will have to manufacture other issues to justify its dogmatic and irrational posture on the electoral reform matter. It claims, for example, that 60% of ‘respondents’ indicated a preference for fingerprints. What PAM does not reveal is that there was unanimous agreement by the public on a sufficiently comprehensive set of recommendations to deal with voter identification problem. Such recommendations as DNA and blood group also attracted much discussion and wide appeal. But, do we just over-treat the problem because there are all these many recommendations with broad appeal? Do we need to adopt every recommendation and make a mockery of commonsense and civilization when there is an adequate, workable and practical subset of those recommendations on which there was unanimity?
What PAM also does not say is that the ERCC report cites the fingerprint matter as the source of major controversy in the entire consultative process. As part of the fingerprint hoax, PAM is seizing upon this major controversy as the easiest and most practical way of creating confusion and mayhem in the country and has called all persons wanting their fingerprint in a database out to a march, to put its theory into practice.
In attempting to make a weak and baseless argument less weak, PAM has now shifted its focus to the committees which have been established to guide the electoral reform process. While PAM seizes upon recommendations made in the ERCC (Newton) report and the NAERBC (Archibald) report to demand a fingerprint on a card, it is at the same time rejecting the other similar committees which are all part of the same electoral reform process. The true character of PAM has come to light as unequivocal manifestations of mendacity and deception. PAM is attempting to mislead and confuse the public regarding the difference between the Boundaries Technical Committee and the Parliamentary Advisory Electoral Reform and Boundaries Committee (both established as part of the electoral reform consultative process), as opposed to the Constituency Boundaries Commission and the Electoral Commission (both established under the Constitution of the Land). Regarding these consultative committees, PAM must either accept all or reject all. This love-hate relationship which PAM has with electoral reform and the consultative committees is an abiding hypocrisy.
Why should PAM conspire to use such dishonest, disrespectful and offensive political tactics on unsuspecting citizens because it finds itself hopeless against a party in government going for a fourth consecutive term in office? If national development and mutual respect among citizens were PAM’s genuine long-term concerns and guiding principles, why hasn’t PAM changed over all these years to be more honest and more respectful? Is it not therefore true that those guys are simply new wine in old bottles?
The true intentions of PAM have now been discerned. This unreasonable and baseless stance that PAM has taken on the fingerprint issue is nothing but a shallow, mal-contrived, political hoax designed to cause confusion and controversy, hoodwink the citizens, slow down the process, and force loopholes into the system. All right-thinking citizens should call on PAM to be more responsible as a major political party in the Federation and to stop the fingerprint HOAX now.
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Hon. Nigel Carty
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