The National Assembly Elections (Amendment) Bill 2007 has been recently introduced in Parliament. Reform of the electoral laws in any county is a very important event. It is certainly so in St. Kitts and Nevis and the Bill presently before our Parliament deserves careful attention from the general public.

As a citizen of St. Kitts and Nevis, these are some of my personal views on the Bill.

1. The Bill makes no provision for the creation of a new Voters List with completely new registration of all qualifying voters. Given the abuses of the past and given the size alone of our current list (as large as the entire population), to say we are having electoral reform without a new Voters’ List is to make a mockery of electoral reform.

2. The Voters’ List is an absolutely key part of the electoral system. Contending views on whether or not to use fingerprinting are a distraction at this time and ought not to cloud the real focus of getting a clean, transparent new Voters’ List in which all parties can, acting reasonably, have confidence.

3. The Bill appears to assume that existing registered voters are registered in constituencies in which they have an appropriate qualifying close connection. This is simply not the reality since the elasticity in the present law has allowed persons to register in constituencies where they do not reside, and have never resided. By its clauses, the Bill will also bless existing abuses in so far as citizens who live overseas are concerned.

4. The Bill retains the concept of St. Kitts-Nevis domicile of origin as a basis for registration and voting in St. Kitts-Nevis. This can
have the result that persons who have never ever lived in St. Kitts-Nevis as an adult can vote here. To my mind that is fundamentally unfair, undermines democracy and is likely to lead to continued abuses in our electoral system.

5. In a country the size of St. Kitts and Nevis where the margin of victory in many constituencies is often only double digits, or less, we should not be using as our model superpower states with very different history and traditions and where an electoral margin far in excess of our entire population will still be called a close election.

Such superpower states also have electoral campaign finance laws and integrity in public life legislation. We have no such safeguards, nor are they mentioned as “coming soon,” or indeed at all. This is regrettable. But the urgent need for campaign finance laws and integrity legislation is not the focus of these comments. Those are important issues, but I want to concentrate on the Bill and what it does, and fails to do, as regards registration and voting in St. Kitts-Nevis.

6. The Bill has 5 clauses in a proposed new Section 42 (1) which lists who will qualify to be registered as a voter. The first clause (a) speaks of citizens who ordinarily reside in St. Kitts and Nevis. The last clause (e) qualifies Commonwealth citizens who have been ordinarily resident in St. Kitts-Nevis for at least 12 months immediately before registering.

The majority of the clauses, 3 of the 5, speak of citizens who are ordinarily resident overseas. This overseas voter emphasis is a worrying matter for me. In articulating my worry I do not think I can improve on the words of the late Sir Lee L. Moore Q.C.

“… the people living in St. Kitts-Nevis could find their wishes overruled by people living abroad….” [this can] “… subvert democracy, making the exercise of the franchise of no effect and giving rise to instability in the country.”

As Mr Moore puts it: there are “differences between citizenship and the franchise, citizenship being concerned with allegiance and protection, the franchise being related to place of residence.”
(all from The Labour Spokesman editorial, 2 November 1983).

7. I think people should be very concerned not only by the fact that overseas persons can vote, but even more so by the fact that the loose and subjective criteria for where you register will enable overseas persons to register in constituencies in which they need not prove any real connection. Their “say so” may very well satisfy the registration officer. And by choosing marginal constituencies, their votes will have more impact than the votes of persons who live here. This erodes democracy.

8. Allowing persons to themselves choose in which constituency they will register, without requiring them to satisfy clear and objectively–verifiable criteria will make it difficult for even well-intentioned registration officials to administer the registration process in a transparent and fair way. It has the potential to cause considerable controversy and confusion. Electoral laws should aim at creating clarity and confidence, not controversy and confusion.

9. All four of the major political parties at some point or other (usually while in Opposition) have protested that registration officials have acted unfairly in the registration process. Where in the Bill does it seek to address this weakness?

The Bill does not make the qualifying criteria for registration more exacting. It does not significantly improve the grounds or the process for challenging allegedly improper registrations.

10. For reasons of cost I do not favour the public purse paying for full time, permanent representatives of all political parties to be stationed at registration offices. In any event, even such presence, without any requirements for clear and verifiable proof of residence in a particular constituency, and a swift and fair process for challenging improper registrations, will be of no real benefit.

11. Before this Bill is even debated in Parliament it is important for the Parliament and the public to also see the proposed Regulations which will set out many of the processes involved in the electoral law. The experience of the 1983/84 amendment exercise clearly shows that serious problems can be caused via the electoral law Regulations and therefore the draft Regulations should also be put into the public domain at this time. I do appreciate that any draft Regulations would almost certainly have to be altered if the amending Bill is altered before enactment, but that to my mind is a minor inconvenience compared to the value of transparency which early circulation would promote. Seeing the draft Regulations now may also serve to clarify certain matters which are not made clear in the Bill.

Our electoral law needs to be fixed in very important respects. If this Bill is passed by Parliament without very substantial changes, after such passage our electoral law will still be in a state that needs to be fixed, in very important respects. What then will be the point of this Bill’s passage?

Government should allow ample time for public feedback on what the Bill does, and what it fails to do. Electoral law reform is not simply about the Government enacting what it has legislative power to enact. In such reform the Government has a special responsibility to listen and heed comments from outside its ranks.

Electoral reform must be about building broad public and cross-party confidence in the central democratic event in any country: election of a Government and an Opposition. The Government, indeed the entire Parliament, needs to avoid the errors of the past.

All of the political parties now in Parliament have been, at some time since the 1983/84 amendments, in Opposition as well as in Government. It should not take more than this to foster a realization that the content of the electoral law must be less about who wins any particular poll than it must be about legislatively articulating principles that are clear and transparent and which create confidence that both the registration process and the poll are fair and seen to be so.

To be sure, the competence and integrity of the people who administer the electoral system will always be crucially important, but if the law itself does not set out clear and detailed principles, criteria and procedures, even good people will lack guidance, and errors (whether mischievous or genuine) will be commonplace and go uncorrected. We can do better than this Bill does - and we should.