THE Electoral Office of Jamaica (EOJ) says that during the February 26 local government elections it will be paying close attention to polling stations in 23 selected areas, located in areas classified as specialist constituencies.

Director of Elections Glasspole Brown said these constituencies are normally comprised of inner-city communities known to be volatile. They are located in St James, Clarendon, St Catherine, and Kingston and St Andrew.

“We will be treating them different from the other constituencies called normal constituencies, in the sense that workers for those divisions in the local government election will be taken from outside of those divisions to man the polling stations on election day,” Brown told the
Jamaica Observer on Thursday.

“Those that we categorise as specialist, we do so because of the historical things in terms of violence, etcetera. So the decision was taken [long ago] to treat those as specialist constituencies. So the workers in the polling stations, more so the presiding officers and the supervisors, are taken from outside of the division or the constituency, so as to minimise any potential intimidation of those particular workers,” Brown explained.

He said, too, that additional security arrangements will be put in place for those electoral divisions which will see greater presence of the security forces and Citizens Action for Free and Fair Elections (CAFFE) observers.

In the meantime, Brown said the EOJ is “fairly advanced” in its preparation for the election to be held on February 26, having secured most of the equipment and recruited the majority of the 32,000 to 35,000 workers needed for the election day process.

“Based on our schedule, we are comfortable with where we are now,” Brown said a few hours ahead of Local Government and Community Development Minister Desmond McKenzie’s declaration of the election date at a JLP meeting held at the Montego Bay Convention Centre.

“We started [our preparations] some time ago. We have recruited our election day workers. We are now in the final stage of training everybody that we require. We needed about 21,000 presiding officers, poll clerks, reserves and supervisors combined,” he said.

He said that there is another group of workers the EOJ is about to finalise, including “one-day policemen, the logistics coordinators, the cleaners, the handymen that will assist us and work with us on election day”.

Said Brown: “We have procured most of our supplies that are needed for the elections. There are some activities that will kick in at the point of nomination, for example the printing of ballots, etcetera. We can’t print those until we know who the nominees are. Those activities will kick in as soon as the announcement is made.”

Touching on the matter of the Government’s push to have the functions of the political ombudsman be subsumed under the Electoral Commission of Jamaica (ECJ), and to do so in time for local and general elections, Brown argued that “the run of elections has nothing to do with the ombudsman, as such.

“There is a particular role that the ombudsman normally plays and more in terms of… a referee in terms of any issue as it relates to behaviour, etcetera. What guides the elections would be the Representation of the People Act (ROPA). It is a separate arrangement between that Act and the Political Ombudsman Act,” he said.

At Tuesday’s sitting of the House of Representatives, Justice Minister Delroy Chuck attempted to have the Political Ombudsman (Amendment) Act, 2024 passed that would see the integration of the ombudsman’s functions into the ECJ, but he was met with resistance.

In tabling the Bill, Chuck had argued that there was an urgent need to have an adjudicator in place before the local government polls. Debate on the Bill was subsequently suspended.

In the meantime, Brown is appealing to people who have not yet picked up their new voter ID cards to do so.

“Those are the cards that will be accepted as their ID cards on election day. The persons who come with their card will be able to move through the process much faster. If you don’t have the card, you will still be able to vote but the difference is you will be required to take a note from the Electoral Office of Jamaica (EOJ) offices [located across] constituencies,” he said.

The local government elections will be administered by the EOJ, a public government agency which carries out the day-to-day operations of the ECJ.