When Noel Lee left his job out of sheer frustration to become assistant director of elections back in 1980, he couldn’t have known that in the years to come he would have been the target of violent mobs of political supporters at home, or that, alone in the wee hours of the morning, he would be transporting ballots in South Africa’s first post-Apartheid election.

Today, however, after all that and much more, Lee doesn’t seem to have regretted his defining career shift and, as he put it, has earned the respect of politicians – the people with whom he had some of his toughest fights.

Just months after assuming the original post as assistant director of elections in June 1980, Lee took the top job as director of elections, where he stayed for 13 years, the longest ever in the post to date.

Jaded as an internal auditor at the Agricultural Marketing Corporation, Lee had answered an advertisement for an assistant director of elections with responsibility for administration, personnel and accounting. That seemed a stroke of luck for Lee who had an accounting background and had studied management. He applied, was interviewed and got the job, “just so”.

“I had voted maybe once or twice before, never knew what a ballot box looked like, nothing, nothing, nothing, and I went,” Lee said.

His appointment meant that a virtual novice was the second-in-command during what is oft referred to as the bloody elections of October 1980, which claimed at least 800 lives.

“It was traumatic, but it was a good experience for me, because I was brand new to the electoral process,” Lee said, followed by a long “Hmmph”.

In the years that followed 1980, until his controversial exit from office in 1993, Lee would go on to take the Jamaican election model to numerous countries, as well as participate in elections across the globe in various capacities.

Additionally, he would preside over the historic 1983 snap elections, which the then Michael Manley-led People’s National Party boycotted.

“To tell the truth, I look back with pride at some of them, most of them, because you make errors like anything else, but you have time to correct them. I am pretty satisfied that everything that I did was fair and square,” Lee said.

Running elections in the ‘mountain kingdom’

In June 1992, Lee arrived in Lesotho, an African country completely landlocked by South Africa, which had not had democratic elections for more than 20 years. His task, as the chief electoral officer, was to make that happen.

He had taken leave from his job as director of elections to carry out the one-year assignment from the Commonwealth Secretariat.

“When I went down there, I met the general who was in charge of the army and he said, ‘Mr Lee, you come here to run elections, let me tell you first of all that I don’t believe in politics, I don’t talk to politicians, so it’s up to you to do what you want to do’,” Lee recalled.

“This is a country where the army officers carry two guns each, you know,” Lee told the Sunday Observer. “Everything was ‘The General’. When I went there, I was literally imposed,” he said.

But his experience at the midst of the Jamaican electoral system proved more than useful as he started doing things “the Jamaican way”.

Everything, from the election laws to voter registration, was modelled off the Jamaican electoral system. That aside, there were still other challenges.

“The two major political parties were in court. So I called them together and I said ‘Look, there is no way I can run an election and have two guys in court and I am trying to bring peace here, so let’s find a way out’,” Lee said.

The Basotho National Party had brought the Basotho Congress Party before the court and the military government was also involved in the suit. In his desire to pull off successful elections, Lee eventually brokered a compromise.

“That was a major, major achievement, you know. All the other diplomats who were there from various countries had looked at it as a minor miracle, because they were trying to solve it for a long, long time,” Lee said.

Late 1992, just when a date had been set for Lesotho’s general elections, home called. Elections in Jamaica were just about due, but the electoral office itself was still in the final stages of preparation. Lee had to return.

“So they kept calling me, ‘Come Mr Lee, come back home. It’s nice you’re doing a good job in Lesotho, but Jamaica come first. Come home because we need you now, because the elections are overdue’,” Lee related.

The pressure, he said, was mainly coming from the People’s National Party, with a newly installed PJ Patterson anxious for his own mandate. The main concern was that the electoral office was slow in producing the voters’ list.

“Well, I explained. and the minister down there in Lesotho said, ‘Mr Lee, you can’t leave because where we are now, if you leave now, the place is going to blow up, because the people are anxious’,” he said.

Lee did not leave immediately, but when he finally got back home, it was pure drama leading up to, and following the 1993 general elections.

“There’s usually the crying out from a losing candidate, he has to blame somebody, and the last elections in 1993, I think I got the wrath of the JLP,” Lee said.

53,000 names not on voters’ list and the Seaga saga

One of the first problems Lee had to encounter was a computer glitch inside the electoral office, which saw some constituencies spilling over into others.

“Westmoreland was four constituencies and they decided to cut one to make way for a constituency in St Catherine. So what happened is that instead of dividing Westmoreland into three, the computer divided into four, but put one of constituencies into Hanover and one …right back to St Catherine, and we didn’t discover that until after the list was printed,” Lee said.

Coupled with that was the rejection of a whopping 50,000 names, due mainly to duplicate registration, Lee said.

“So I got the 50,000 rejections and said, ‘Let me look at it’. I found that 16,000 of the 50,000 were genuine people who should be on the list, but were not on the list. I took it to the committee, I said, ‘These 16,000 people have to go on because they are not on because of our mistake’ and…we got those 16,000 on.

“A lot of people were cancelled because of underage or duplication, all sorts of things. In the end, about 20,000 persons were genuinely rejected out of what we had, and the JLP never felt too good about the rejections, although it was explained to them and so on, and at committee level it was set out what was what and so on.

“The next thing I hear is Mr (Edward) Seaga (leader of the Opposition) coming out and saying at a public meeting that there were 53,000 persons left off the list, mostly Labourites, and Mr Lee was responsible for that.

“There is a game, a political game. What he said was that if the Labour Party was successful at the polls, then he wouldn’t want me as director of elections. Well, he didn’t win.

“The committee had a vote on it. I gather that the two PNP and three independent persons were in favour of me continuing. I spoke to Prof (Professor Karl Dundas) and said ‘It don’t make any sense. You can’t be a director of elections with one side opposed to you. Although five people will vote for you, it don’t make sense, because everything you do, you going to be wrong, you can never be able to do anything right, and if you even make a decision, say if a decision goes bad, then you going to hear say is because. and if go right, you going hear it’s another thing’.”

Lee returned to the civil service as an accounting officer in the Ministry of Construction, but his involvement in elections did not end there.

In 1994, the world watched as Apartheid ended and Black South Africans voted in that country’s first multi-racial elections. Noel Lee was a part of it.

“This was (Nelson) Mandela’s election and it was something, it was an eye-opener for me,” Lee said.

Lee was on assignment from the Commonwealth Secretariat as the chief electoral officer for KwaZulu Natal, a southeastern province in South Africa, which has a current population of 9.4 million.

“That was a wonderful experience,” he said. “I wouldn’t change that for nothing, it was great. It was, you’re with black people and this was their first election; the dedication of people who’d never voted in all their lives,” Lee added, clearly still moved by the will of the black South Africans.

“[Those] people had never voted at all, at all, at all and it was something else to see those people rally,” Lee said.

To begin with, there was no formal voters’ list because, since only whites enjoyed the right to vote under Apartheid, it was difficult to put a number on the Black population. So, once people could prove some criteria like residence and age, they could vote.

“And believe me, they pushed their old people in wheel barrows, the aged, come to vote,” said Lee. “It was something, and they would wait in the line. And the first night we ran out of ballots because we didn’t know how many people. We had to extend it for two days to have some more ballots printed and, you know, to see people stand up all day and night waiting to vote; just to vote, you know. It was something man.”

Naturally, Lee introduced much of the “Jamaican way” of doing things in the elections, such as identifying and setting up polling stations.

“It was really, really, really heart warming for me to help out a black nation,” he said. “It was nice work, it was difficult, but interesting.”

On to the world

Lee barely had time to leave South Africa in 1994 when the United Nations called about an assignment concerning election laws in another African nation – Liberia.

“Every place that you go is a brand new experience that really fulfills your heart, some personal, some on the job, some a mixture of both,” Lee said.

He said while Liberia had had elections before, there was a problem concerning fraud, and his job, along with a team of representatives from other countries, was to build in safeguards against that.

Lee’s work in Liberia did not end “so well,” as news that Charles Taylor, that country’s former dictator, who will stand trial for war crimes later this year, was advancing to take over Monrovia, where Lee was staying, forced a premature departure of the UN team. However, he said, his greatest experience was a non-election event.

He was at a peace conference when a gentleman approached him. The man started by saying the Lord had sent him to Lee.

“In my mind right away I said is an ‘ol trickster dis, and I said ‘look yah man, mi come from Jamaica, weh pure bandooloo run’. Dis ya likkle man fi come yah come lock me now, but I still listened to his story. He said, ‘You know, sir, I just got a call from the hospital, message came to me that my wife is dying in the hospital, suddenly she took in and she is bleeding, she is losing blood rapidly and she needs an operation. It has to be done immediately’,” Lee related.

The man said he neither had money for fare to the hospital nor for the cost of the operation. After much pondering, Lee gave him the money.

On the second day of the conference, he was standing on a balcony when he saw six men coming toward him.

“In Liberia, they tell you, when you are kidnapped, you must do so and so. I’ve been briefed like that many times, and I saw the men coming and one of the things you must do is back up against a wall so that they don’t surround you, so I backed up against the wall and they went in a sort of semi-circle,” Lee said.

When they reached him, however, the men knelt.

“They said: ‘Sir, we come to pay you homage.'”

The man to whom Lee had given the money was their chief, who had told them of Lee. The entire village, they said, was celebrating and they had been chosen to say thanks.

“Same way they came down, they just turned around and walked away. You feel a way, you just feel touched and moved and everything one time. That was the greatest thing that happened to me in Liberia,” Lee said.

Over the next six years, he would go on to work in elections in several other countries, including some in the Caribbean and Central and South America.

Nevertheless, some of his greatest concerns lie with the electoral system in Jamaica.

Jamaica’s election system is good, but…

“Jamaica’s election system is good, you know. I rate it as the second best in the world – after Australia,” Lee said. But, he said, the system is often undermined by unscrupulous persons who try to find ways around it.

“In Jamaica, like everything else, the Jamaican man must find a way to beat the system. And believe me, every system that we can land you with, give him two days,” Lee said.

He said systems endure in countries like Australia, because the culture is different and ostracises people who attempt manipulation. But in Jamaica, he said, such people are celebrated.

He said compulsory voting and the establishment of a national registration system would go a far way in remedying manipulation.

“I’ll say any time Jamaicans want a free and fair election, they’ll get it, any time they want it,” Lee said.

Under the national registration system, every child born would be registered with a unique number, which would indicate his/her year and parish of birth, among other things.

“I think that they should seriously go national registration – quickly,” said Lee. “Because that would solve a lot of problems and really reduce the rush closer to elections.”

For the upcoming elections, Lee said while much of the old ways of corrupting elections had been eliminated, some, such as members of parliament trading votes between constituencies, persist.

“I wouldn’t want to say there’ll be corruption, because I don’t like the word. There’ll be manipulation,” he said.

And while he has had many a dispute with politicians over constituency boundaries or voters’ lists, and mobs of political supporters have attacked him, Lee said he enjoyed his time working in the electoral system.

“I think I gained the respect of political parties, because I could talk to everybody…even now. The only one that I had a little problem with was Seaga,” Lee said. “I learnt to deal with politicians openly – anything you do, it must be something that can be heard by everybody, because politicians talk.”

Lee, who now does accounting on a part-time basis for the Anti-Dumping and Subsidies Commission, is satisfied with his tenure at the electoral office and marks the dedication of the staff there as outstanding.

“I must have done something reasonably well, I still go down to the electoral office and they hug me up,” he said, with a shrug and a little laugh.