ECJ chairman weighs in on vote-buying debate

CHAIRMAN of the Electoral Commission of Jamaica (ECJ), Professor Errol Miller, has cautioned that reports of vote-buying be treated with scepticism, arguing that there was no concrete evidence to suggest that this practice has any real influence on which party wins an election.

"The charge that votes are bought is an impression, not necessarily a fact, and when we look across the world it's not the person that spends the most money that necessarily wins the elections, so the idea that people are spending more money does not necessarily mean that the voters have been purchased," Professor Miller said.

"I think we need to respect the intelligence and the integrity of the average Jamaican once we ensure that what they do inside the polling station is not known to anybody else but themselves," he added.

The ECJ chairman was responding to questions about vote-buying during a press conference at the ECJ's Red Hills Road offices in Kingston on Wednesday.

"I don't know of any jurisdiction across the world which is democratic — and I think Jamaica surely is — where the people are mere pawns and mendicants without the ability to think for themselves, and that any influence you apply to them previous to an election will make a difference to how they vote, and that is why we take the ballot in secret," Professor Miller said.

His statement also came in the wake of a 'snapshot' study done by University of the West Indies anthropologist Dr Herbert Gayle between November 23 and 30, 2011, canvassing the opinions of 240 young men and women in urban and rural Jamaica across 12 parishes, including 27 constituencies.

Gayle said the research team unearthed evidence of vote-buying in almost all of the 27 constituencies canvassed. He said so widespread was the practice that in some constituencies the team interviewed less than 10 persons conveniently, and a third of those persons had experienced vote-buying. Furthermore, he said more than a third (88 of 240) of the sample experienced direct face-to-face vote-buying.

On Wednesday, the commission chairman highlighted the efforts made to clean up the electoral system, including legislative changes made by Parliament, just last month to, among other things, ban the use of cellular phones, digital cameras and other image-recording devices in polling stations. Another major accomplishment, he said, was the commitment of the two major political parties to have all their candidates comply fully with sections 55 to 61 of the Representation Of the People Act (ROPA). This includes submitting to returning officers full statements of all expenditure made in the conduct of their campaigns.

The commission will then publish these statements in the newspapers and on the Internet. He said further that steps were being taken to ensure transparency, with Parliament's recent approval of a recommendation increasing the limit of expenditure by a candidate from the $3 million set in 1997 to $10 million for this election.

"The reason the money was changed from $3 million to $10 million was that in the consultations, we heard from senior members of the political parties that they had signed to reports that were not true because this limit was not changed," Professor Miller said, noting that the report issued in the 2007 general election showed some persons saying they had spent more than the $3 million while some reported $0 expenditure.

He was also sceptical about recent reports on the level of corruption and transparency in Jamaica.

"When you look at the number of people reporting that Jamaica is very corrupt, you get a figure of more than 80 per cent, which is very high. When you look at the figures in the very same survey for what is your personal experience of corruption it is under 20 per cent. This means there is a perception of distortion in the matter, where we are perceiving the situation to be much worse than it really is," he said. "This is something I have always known because we have a tendency in Jamaica to generalise the exception to portray it as the rule, and in that way cast a pall of inferiority and corruption over all of us, and we have to be careful."

Global anti-corruption watchdog, Transparency International, in its latest report last month said Jamaica scored 3.3 out of 10 in the 2011 Global Corruption Perception Index (CPI) ranking — 10 being least corrupt and one most corrupt. Jamaica was ranked 86 out of 182 countries in that survey.

On Wednesday, Tom Tavares-Finson, the Jamaica Labour Party representative on the ECJ, was also dismissive of the vote-buying claims.

"It seems to me that in order to complete the transaction the person who sells the vote must be able to prove to the person buying the vote that they in fact complied. It is for that very reason that the commission has put in place several critical provisions," he said, in reference to the move to take away the ability of persons to take photographs of their ballots or to vote openly.

However, Dr DK Duncan, the People's National Party representative on the ECJ, has differed.

"I would say, without fear of contradiction, that it is the most significant factor at the moment — the influence of big money in the outcome of this election. It is a fact that it is the clearest present danger to our political system and it is happening in front of our eyes now and in various forms," Dr Duncan told reporters.