PARLIAMENT yesterday settled the issue of sentences for open-voting, removing one of the primary obstacles to an early general election listed Sunday night by Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller.

This clears the way for the prime minister to any time now advise the governor general to dissolve Parliament as the nation prepares to vote in general elections on August 27.

Yesterday, the House of Representatives, at the urging of its leader, Dr Peter Phillips, and Opposition member of the Electoral Commission of Jamaica (ECJ) Karl Samuda, approved the Senate’s amendments to the ECJ report which on June 15 removed the mandatory nature of the sentences for open balloting.

The Senate’s move breached a 28-year convention under which Parliament had refrained from varying recommendations from the ECJ and its predecessor, the Electoral Advisory Commission (EAC), and created a deadlock between Parliament and the ECJ.

Phillips and Samuda, as well as the Leader of Opposition Business in the Senate, Senator Anthony Johnson, previously stood firmly with the convention, and rejected the amendments. But, parliamentarians on both sides of the House, including Attorney General Senator A J Nicholson, Government backbenchers K D Knight and John Junor, and Opposition spokesman on justice, Delroy Chuck, had backed the Senate’s move.

Phillips yesterday read a letter from the commission which recommended that the House of Representatives accept the Senate’s amendments. He said that the letter cleared the way for him to recommend to the House that it adopts the amendments.

The ECJ’s letter also recommended that 17 other mandatory penalties in the voting Acts should also be amended.

Dr Phillips said that the House would not only accept the Senate’s amendments, but would also require that the Cabinet issue drafting instructions to the Chief Parliamentary Counsel for the bills necessary to remove the other mandatory penalties in the next Parliament.

“I will therefore move that the House accept the amendments to the bills,” Phillips urged the House.

Samuda supported the motion, but criticised the prime minister for suggesting that the issue was sufficient reason to delay the general elections to the end of August.

“It is incongruous for sensible people to expect that we could accept that as any sensible reason for this extension, because it was always known by the House leader and by the Opposition that it was our intention to come here today to support the amendments,” Samuda said.

He supported the argument of those who backed the Senate’s amendment that Parliament was the supreme legislature. However, he said that current political leaders are “morally” bound to support the convention set by their predecessors in 1979.

“It is good that the matter has ended this way,” Samuda commented.

Knight, who led the revolt against the recommendations for mandatory sentences in the House, welcomed how the matter had been settled. He said that the convention was maintained, while the mandatory penalties were removed.

Prime Minister Simpson Miller, while naming the election date of August 27 on Sunday night, had listed the impasse over the mandatory sentences for open-voting as one of the primary reasons for the seven-week wait for the election.

Three bills – the Representation of the People Act, the Kingston and St Andrew Corporation Act, and the Parish Councils Act – have been amended to include penalties including fines up to $80,000 and imprisonment of three to five years for open balloting. The Senate had removed the minimum levels from the bills.