A resident of the St Catherine South Eastern constituency whose name has been left off the preliminary voters’ list is seeking to bar the director of elections from printing and publishing the official voters’ list finalised on June 16, 2006 without his name being on it.

The St Catherine resident, businessman Oswald George Reid, has gone to the Supreme Court in a bid to bar the publication of the voters’ register.

Reid said he has been disfranchised by the re-verification of addresses which was done recently by electoral officials.

The ex parte application for a court order for leave to apply for judicial review of the director of elections’ decision to omit his name, was filed in the Supreme Court on Monday by attorney-at-law Arthur Williams and was granted yesterday by Justice Paulette Williams.

The defendants are the chief electoral officer/director of elections, Danville Walker, and Attorney-General A J Nicholson.

The application for judicial review is to be filed within 14 days from yesterday, after which the case could be heard within five days.

The Electoral Office of Jamaica recently published a new voters’ list which omitted the names of 210,000 people whose addresses were not re-verified during an islandwide registration.

Reid said he was applying for judicial review of the decision to omit his name from the official list of electors, dated June 16, 2006, for polling division No 6 in the constituency of St Catherine South Eastern.

In his application, he said he was a qualified person entitled to be registered as an elector in the polling division in which he is an ordinary resident, and accordingly was entitled to be on the official list of electors prepared and published in accordance with Section 7 of the Representation of the People Act.

Reid claimed that the omission of his name from the official list of electors would deprive him of his right to vote.

He said there was no other form of redress available to him and that he was not aware of any consideration that the respondents, the director of elections and the attorney-general, or any of them, have given to the matter in question.

According to Reid, since 2002 he has been a qualified person entitled to be registered as an elector in polling division No 6, where he normally lives. He said he is still a resident there and this was confirmed by agents of the director of elections, hence there is no valid reason for his name to be omitted from the voters’ list.

According to court documents, Reid said he voted in the constituency in the general election of October 2002 and the parish council elections of June 2003. Since 2002, his name has appeared on all six-monthly final voters’ lists for the constituency and the polling division.

He added that the last final voters’ list for the constituency was dated November 30, 2005.

Reid said that in June 2004 he moved from Chigwell Road to Wimbledon Way, also in Waterford, which is also within the boundaries of polling division No 6 and on August 31, 2005, he was visited as a part of the voter re-verification by staff of the Electoral Office of Jamaica, and was duly noted as being “verified at his new address”.

“At no time was I summoned by the returning officer for St Catherine South Eastern,” Reid said yesterday, “on the basis that I was not qualified to be enumerated in the polling division where I was verified.”

He said that on June 23, 2006 he visited the EOJ’s constituency office at 34 Passagefort Drive, accompanied by Leontine Hall, to ask the reason for the omission of his name from the list.

When he asked what the procedure was for restoring his name to the list, he was told by a staff member that she had received a memo from the director of elections that any person whose name does not appear on the final voters’ list dated June 16, 2006, must apply in the normal way – that is re-enumerate, and staff from the EOJ would visit the person’s house and verify him or her, and the name would appear on the November 2006 final voters’ list.

Reid is claiming that if an election were called before the November 2006 final voters’ list is printed and published, he would not be able to vote and therefore “would be deprived of my right to vote for the candidate of my choice in any election”.