There was a time in Jamaica, not all that long ago, when it was not uncommon to hear tales of women running through bushes in the darkest night, desperately clutching ballot boxes to their heaving chests, with armed political thugs breathing down their necks in hot pursuit.

Electoral fraud was a constant feature of elections through actions such as bogus voting with stuffing of boxes and multiple marking of ballots by the same individual, often defying the use of the iconic purple voting ink; ballot stealing; mass intimidation of voters using violence; vote-buying; and the like.

Former Electoral Office of Jamaica directors, including Messrs Noel Lee, William Chin See, Danville Walker, and Orrette Fisher, could recount in their sleep the pressure and the drama, often deadly, of election campaigns.

A series of spectacular electoral reform measures — notably the introduction of the Electronic Voter Identification and Ballot Issuing System (EVIBIS) used in problem-plagued constituencies to identify voters — ushered in “one person, one vote” and eliminated impersonation.

The process was helped, no doubt, by former Prime Minister P J Patterson, who disavowed confrontational politics, leading to Jamaican elections shunning widespread violence that pitted the two major political parties against each other and becoming a model for other countries.

Testifying to the stratospheric change, Professor Errol Miller, former chairman of the Electoral Commission of Jamaica, declared in a 2018 paper:

“The general election of February 25, 2016 was the most peaceful and the best conducted parliamentary election in the history of Jamaica. The political party in Government changed on the margin of a single seat in the House of Representatives. None of the 112 losing candidates attributed their loss to any defect or malfunction of the electoral system.”

Saying that countries within the Caribbean and across the world had been copying elements of Jamaican electoral practice, Professor Miller, nevertheless, also warned: “The fact that anything is described as an international best practice does not exclude it from rigorous scrutiny.”

Scrutiny, indeed, is a must.

The current, though as yet undeclared electoral campaign, has been slowly heating up, with increasing press reports of the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) and the People’s National Party (PNP) trading accusations of political sabotage, violence, and destruction of campaign paraphernalia.

While it is not yet anywhere close to the bloodletting of past elections, such as the 1980 campaign when a reported 800 people, probably higher, were killed in the name of party politics, these skirmishes must be nipped in the bud.

One notable flashpoint is the St Thomas Eastern constituency where sitting JLP Member of Parliament Dr Michelle Charles and PNP MP aspirant Ms Rosemarie Shaw exchanged accusations about destruction of campaign material and, in Ms Charles’ case, physical attack on a supporter.

“I cannot guarantee the safety of PNP campaign paraphernalia because, despite my appeal for restraint, the PNP has been viciously provoking my supporters,” Ms Charles claimed in a statement not to be taken lightly.

The last thing we can afford as a nation is the unravelling of the relative political peace and our electoral system that has contributed to the economic bright lights on the horizon.