Enjoying the cushion of the PNP’s largest delegate base and the psychological advantage of winning most votes in last week’s vice-presidential contest, Karl Blythe has put his colleagues on fair notice.

He will be watching them like a hawk, Blythe said last week, to ensure that there is no padding of the delegates register as contenders continue their jockeying for advantage as they prepare to challenge for the party’s top job when P J Patterson retires.

“We are not going to return to the paper groups,” Blythe told the Sunday Observer. “All these groups that were registered have to be properly checked.”

The foundation of the People’s National Party is supposed to rest on constituency groups, community cells where people work to carry the party’s political message and recruit votes for the party.

Although, in recent years, up to 3,500 delegates have been registered for the PNP’s annual conference, the officials concede that the once-vaunted constituency organisation has fallen under severe stress.

In many cases, these constituency organisations existed only on paper. Constituency representatives paid the annual fees to the central secretariat, but with the sole purpose of being able to rustle up delegates so as to have a power-base at the annual conference.

In some instances, the groups actually existed, but did not meet the party’s criteria for registration.

They might not have recorded their meetings or held proper annual conferences and held off on supplying the necessary information to the central secretariat.

“There was this continuing allegation about paper groups or bogus groups,” explained deputy general secretary Colin Campbell, “so what we did, we went back to the constitutional requirements and enforced them.”

Under the new rules, the party secretariat randomly checks to ensure that each group holds an annual general meeting by March of every year, ahead of the compilation of the final delegates voters list at the end of July.

“That is a criteria that we are enforcing, because it immediately eliminates paper and bogus groups,” said Campbell. “In the past, we had been doing only the financial side of things, so once the dues were being thrown, then we would consider that a functioning group.”

Paul Burke, whose unexpected entry into the vice-presidential race forced the PNP to hold last Saturday’s special delegate’s vote, had long complained about the paper groups within the party.

“For the past 10 years in particular, at a scale unrivalled in the history of the People’s National Party, the bogus, paper and non-functioning groups, paid for and controlled by some of our present day leaders, are dominant over the real and functioning struggling groups,” Burke said last July, during a panel discussion marking the 111th anniversary of PNP founder Norman Manley’s birth.

The consequence of the cleaning up and re-certification of constituency groups is that for the delayed 66th conference held on January 23, only about 1,600 delegates were eligible.

Significantly, too, with the changes made to the list, the bulk of the delegates were from two constituencies which had more than 100 delegates each – Blythe’s Central Westmoreland (167) and Simpson Miller’s St Andrew South Western (145).

So when Burke at the January conference challenged for one of the four vice-presidential slots, rather than allowing the incumbents to be returned en bloc as party bosses had hoped, Blythe had an in-built advantage, as was apparent in last week’s election.

The former Water and Housing minister, forced out of the Cabinet in 2002 over the scandal at the shelter project Operation PRIDE, won 1,443 votes. This was 58 more than Simpson Miller, the country’s most popular politician who is considered to be front-runner in the PNP’s leadership race.

Blythe has publicly admitted to an alliance with Simpson Miller for last week’s election, which Peter Phillips’ campaign read as being linked to Burke’s entry into the race, and as an effort to weaken their man’s candidacy for Patterson’s job.

Phillips’ St Andrew East Central constituency took only 45 delegates to the conference and the security minister received 1,229 votes to place third in the contest. But both the security minister and his handlers insist that things will be different by the time the party holds its next conference in September.

However, Blythe is apparently taking nobody’s word that all the groups that will be registered in July are legitimate.

Clearly aiming at the Phillips camp, he argued that claims in some quarters that things will be different with the new delegates list “sends a signal to me that they know who these new groups are going to vote for”.

Said Blythe: “One has to be very careful that we did not open the floodgates and paper groups are back in because persons may have more money than others.

“They pay up for these groups now for a year, just to vote for them. That is not good for the party.

“We cleaned up the list, we ran an election on the cleanest list ever this time, even though the numbers were small, and that’s the way it has to be, to ensure that what we say we have as groups are bona fide groups that will be meeting all the requirements of the party.”

Bobby Pickersgill, the party’s chairman who is a declared candidate for the presidency, apparently does not share Blythe’s concerns.

“Audits have been carried out, by the secretariat, on the groups,” Pickersgill explained.

“Those audits will continue and the closer we get to the presidential election, the cleaner and purer the list will have to be, and demonstrably so. So everybody will be looking out.”

Indeed, those in direct charge of this scrutiny are adamant that the process cannot be manipulated.

“There is absolutely no chance of paper groups coming on because of the systems that we have put in place,” Campbell said. “It requires that every single group meets. And if the group meets, then it’s a real group, not a paper group.”

How PNP delegates are chosen:

. Delegates are selected by party groups.

Each group of 10 people is allowed one delegate, so a group of 20 people gets two delegates.

. Each recognised constituency has to have at least 20 functioning party groups. There is no limit to the number of groups within a constituency.

A Constituency is recognised when it holds elections and generally conducts its own affairs.

. Each recognised constituency gets two representatives to the National Executive Council (NEC). Unrecognised constituencies, which have less than 20 functioning groups, get one representative on the NEC.

The NEC has a total of 254 members which include:

. Elected members such as the president and vice-president.

. The chairman of each of the six regions.

. All Members of Parliament.

. All Senators.

. Councillors have two representatives.

. The party’s arms and affiliates, such as the Women’s Group, the Patriots, the Youth Arm and the National Workers’ Union, are each allocated a certain number of votes, for example the NWU gets 50.

. Life members are each given one vote.

. Each of the party’s six regions gets delegates equivalent to the number of parliamentary seats within the region. For example, Kingston and St Andrew has 15 parliamentary seats so there are 15 delegates from the region on the NEC. In total, there are 60 delegates from the six regions.