THE Electoral Commission of Jamaica (ECJ) confirmed yesterday that it is now looking at constitutional anomalies in some constituencies where boundaries have crossed into other parishes.

However, these anomalies, like the promised $1.6-billion voter reverification and the constitutional breaches created by two constituencies — St Andrew North Eastern and Trelawny Southern — falling below the lower limit for the number of voters per constituency, are not likely to be addressed before the next general election.

Representatives of the ECJ and the Electoral Office of Jamaica (EOJ) were guests at the weekly Jamaica Observer Monday Exchange at the newspaper’s Beechwood Avenue headquarters in Kingston.

The Boundaries Committee of the House of Representatives is currently awaiting a report from the commission on how it can solve at least 90 boundary anomalies which it had detected in 11 parishes earlier this year.

The most current issue concerns that of the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP)-held constituency of Trelawny Southern represented by Marisa Dalrymple-Phillibert, which has an electorate of 18,370, and is below the lower constitutional limit of 18,398. Another JLP-held constituency, St Andrew North Eastern, represented by Delroy Chuck, has an electorate of 18,299 which is also below the lower limit. However, no parish boundary anomaly has been detected in St Andrew.

Parliamentarians raised some concerns in May when they approved the report, suggesting then that the issue of constituencies having areas crossing into other parishes was being treated “flippantly” in the electoral process, despite being unconstitutional. However, it was admitted that a number of these issues had been ignored due to the lack of technology, as Parliament and the ECJ focused on the population of the lower and upper limits of the electorate.

Speaker of the House of Representatives Michael Peart, who also chairs the Boundaries Committee, urged the committee to submit a list and the location of individual polling divisions within each parish to pinpoint where the suspected anomalies existed.

Peart said that with the use of new technology, the ECJ should be able to determine where the anomalies existed and address them.

Yesterday, Director of Elections Orrette Fisher confirmed that the ECJ has started the first set of meetings dealing with the anomalies which have been raised by the House’s Boundaries Committee.

“That exercise has started. We have had the first set of meetings and we will be having more meetings going forward, because we have until the 31st (of March 2016) when Parliament needs to sign off the constituency boundary changes,” Fisher explained.

He said that in the past there was a lot of dependence on what was heard on the ground from people who may have lived there, based on what their grandparents would have told them, in determining the boundaries.

“Now, with the emerging technology, the ECJ has naturally moved to utilise the geographic information system (GIS) and, therefore, mapping out constituency boundaries has now become more precise,” he told the Observer Monday Exchange.

Fisher said that as the EOJ seeks to expand that programme, the accuracy may show up where there are perceived anomalies.

“We now have to go on the ground to get the correct information, and we are proceeding to do that the more the information becomes available,” he stated.

He said that with the emergence of satellite imagery, the commission is now in a position where things that were assumed or taken for granted can be scientifically tested.