MEMBERS of Parliament (MPs) yesterday rejected recommendations contained in a report submitted to Parliament by the Electoral Commission of Jamaica (ECJ) for the realignment of constituency boundaries to correct anomalies to 153 polling divisions (PDs) across the island.

Director of Elections Orrette Fisher told the Jamaica Observer that the boundary breaches will therefore remain until the next ECJ review, which is due between the years 2020 and 2022.

According to the ECJ, 33 constituencies across 12 parishes are impacted by the misalignments between parish and polling division boundaries.

This could create issues such as political candidates actually representing geographic areas which technically do not fall within the parish which they intend to represent; or voters in a particular area of a parish could decide the political outcome of a constituency or electoral division in an adjoining parish.

The ECJ’s position is that the breaches go against Section 67/2 of the Constitution, but at yesterday’s sitting of the Boundaries Committee of the House of Representatives, members, led by St Catherine South Western MP Everald Warmington, were adamant that the report was riddled with errors and questioned the accuracy of the technology used to determine the anomalies.

Warmington argued that approval was initially given for the boundaries affecting 90 PDs to be rectified, but that the ECJ had, in its March 2016 report, presented a list of 153 PDs.

He further accused the ECJ of being either incompetent or having ulterior motives.

“If we as a committee asked the commission to give to us the PDs that they were going to define anomalies with, why give us 90 if you have this vast amount of PDs that you intended to review? Now you have a 70 per cent increase above the request that we have and the approval that we gave… Either it’s the height of total ineptitude and incompetence [or] something definitely underhanded was going on there. Maybe they didn’t want us to know the full amount… or there was some ulterior motive why it had to go up by 70 per cent,” he stated.

The director of elections explained that having got permission from Parliament to carry out investigations into “suspected anomalies”, the political directorate was included in the process to confirm PDs where anomalies exist.

But Warmington accused Fisher of “misleading” the committee, charging that the parish boundaries fora to which Fisher referred were held to inform about the ECJ’s determination on the anomalies, not to elicit input.

The director of elections maintained in his Observer interview that: “I have the signed copies of all the persons who signed and reports from the various parish council committees which show that the process that was established with the participation of the political representatives, was followed.”

He told the committee that in carrying out the boundary confirmations, it became apparent that in some instances more than one polling division in an area was affected, and therefore the additional 63 PDs were connected to the original 90 that were submitted.

During the stormy debate, the electoral office team was urged to “use common sense”, with Warmington charging that the EOJ could not justify its position, and that the committee could therefore only agree to a portion of the recommendations.

“Is what wrong wid everybody at the EOJ? Unu gone mad?” St Andrew North Central MP Karl Samuda exclaimed.

The committee agreed only on the recommendation for the realignment of boundaries to correct breaches in the lower limit of electors in St Andrew North Eastern, and the realignment of boundaries to correct breaches in the lower limit of electors in Trelawny Southern.