Dear Editor,

The five of us, very senior citizens, plead for the immediate fixing of the voters’ list. On the list used for the February 25 General Election, we saw the names of dead relatives and friends and those of long-migrated family members who had become citizens of other countries.

Recently, two of us went to collect our new voter ID cards and the courteous assistant handed us two more cards; same last names and same address. I gave mine back and told her my husband had died in 2007, but my friend kept hers as a souvenir and said nothing about her husband’s passing from 2002. We cannot wait for the new, correct voters’ list. We must find the money to employ the scores of university graduates who can’t find work and the dozens of secondary school leavers who have to work.

Train them properly and put them in one-colour uniform (khaki, navy blue or grey), with the Electoral Office of Jamaica (EOJ) emblem on the pocket and caps of the same colour. Don’t let them loose in the motley array of the last set of enumerators who complained that some residents chased them away. Then again, the EOJ must look at the old enumeration questionnaire. What kinds of questions are you asking? Is it relevant to enumeration?

Also, the ‘vote paper’ is too complicated and colourful and full of lines and curves and designs. It looks like the masterpiece of a once-great artist. Can we have a simple vote form in black and white with four columns: Name of Candidate, Initial of Party (PIP), Symbol of Party (the only colour on the ‘vote paper’) and in the last column, a little box in which the simple mark or tick can be made?

We ask for a simple, non-crowded vote form when we go to vote next time. I wish they would call us, retired teachers, to design as well an uncomplicated, result-bearing, fact-yielding enumeration questionnaire and a voting form that requires no explanation nor interpretation.

Veronica Carnegie

veronica_carnegie@cwjamaica.com