The Tribune

By NICOLE BURROWS

The Tribune recently reported ‘Legal Advice Sought Amid Low Voter Registration’ and the Nassau Guardian reported ‘Voter Registration Plummets: Nearly 80,000 fewer sign up to vote compared to five years ago’.

In essence, the number of voters registered as of October, 2016, for the 2017 general election in the Bahamas is almost half the number of voters registered as of October, 2011, for the 2012 general election.

There is conjecture about the cause of this supposed election malaise on the part of the Bahamian people.

Is it that Bahamians are just fed up with voting?

Is it that they see no candidate worth voting for so they just don’t bother to register?

Is it that they don’t care at all about the election?

Is it that they’ve given up on caring?

Is the registration process too difficult or disruptive?

Are Bahamians trying to send a message to their current and prospective leaders?

I don’t know that the reason for low voter registration to date is rooted in any one of those six questions.

The Tribune article goes on to explain that Parliamentary Commissioner Sherlyn Hall is trying to determine via the Attorney General’s office if it’s lawful to automatically re-register 2012 voters for the 2017 election.

I’d like to know why this is even a consideration, regardless of the low registration turnout observed thus far. Did Hall offer this as a legitimate thought or pursuit, or did the interviewer ask him leading questions which resulted in an answer he didn’t intend to give? Is he trying to tell us that people are leaning on him to do the unorthodox to ensure they keep power where it is?

In theory, if this automatic re-registration were to meet approval, no identifying documents would be required of voters other than a previous voter’s card. Such a process would result in adding back from an old register which includes people who have passed on in the last five years, people who have relocated for any reason, and, worst of all, people who were illegally registered.

Hall is quoted as saying “what politicians want me to do, is accept the 2012 card for 2017”. Now, I didn’t conduct the interview, and I didn’t hear it first-hand, but if these words are accurate, it raises an important question. Did someone with a political appointment request this of Hall … that he make this inquiry into whether he can use an old register for a new election? And if that is the case, what is with these people and old ideas to address new concerns?

Hall appears to take the position that “some of those people didn’t get their cards by producing a birth certificate or passport”. Well, why does Hall think so? If he believes this, who were these people who got their cards without producing a birth certificate or passport? How many of them were there? Moreover, why in the hell were they allowed to vote in the last election?

For Hall to even raise the possibility that some voters got their voter’s cards by deception is at a minimum unsettling.

If registration officials are so sceptical about the citizenship of voters now, why weren’t they sceptical about the same before? And why were those persons who aroused suspicion allowed to vote in the midst of officials’ scepticism?

The more you try to get to the bottom of a problem in the Bahamas, the more questions you end up asking and the more you have unanswered.

For someone to suggest that Hall or anyone else should analyse an existing or previous voter’s citizenship now is ludicrous. If even a quarter of all voters’ citizenship is in question, who has time to specially verify those voters’ citizenship just months away from the next general election? In an office that can barely do its main job at all or on time?

As far as I’m concerned, if we had any sense, this and all the problems that come to light as a result of this, could have been (and could actually still be) avoided.

Why is there a registration process at all? What if any Bahamian citizen, aged 18-plus, with a valid birth certificate, passport, and previous voter’s card, was allowed to take their government-issued identification (ID) which confirms their Bahamian citizenship to the polling station to vote on election day?

Bahamians could go straight to the polls with their IDs, no registration required. And, if voting confidentiality is a concern it shouldn’t be, because they can already track your vote to your name, so what difference does it make? But in a more sensible set-up, there would be a way around that. That sensible set-up would include a national registry, which we already have, at least in part. There is already a national registry of births and deaths; we could use that to start the process. From that register, you know who has died and is no longer alive to cast a vote. You register every birth in the country, identify according to existing laws who is a citizen by birth, and assign a number to that person.

That number then gets used for everything a citizen must do, every benefit a citizen must receive, in her or his lifetime: national insurance/social security, driver’s licence, national health insurance, and it appears on your passport and birth certificate, and voter’s cards, visibly or electronically disguised.

Why do we need a voter’s register, when you operate a national register that manages every relevant detail about your citizens’ identification?

In fact, the voting register was and still is in some places and ways a means to eliminate people who are qualified to vote but whom the establishment would prefer didn’t have the ability to vote.

The national registry eliminates that extra level of potential discrimination and confusion that we are now beginning to see unravel at the parliamentary registry.

As far as I’m concerned, the less you give Bahamians to do, the better. The less you make them responsible for, the better. The less they have to think, the better. Bypass voter registration altogether. Invest the time and money it takes to make that halfway work and limp along into revising the system altogether for something that works overall.

If there is still concern about ballot tracking to see who voted for which candidate, disorder the numbers on the ballots. Issue them randomly to the voter, not in alphabetical order or in the order of the register.

Have 13 sub-stations within each polling station that each deal with two letters of the alphabet per last names, keeping it very simple. Jane Brown walks in and goes to station 1 (A and B surnames), they find her on the national register, she has her birth certificate and passport as back up to show her citizenship, and she is given a randomly selected ballot (ie, a number out of sequence and not traceable to her identification), and she votes according to rules … marks her ‘X’, and leaves the polling station. But no birth certificate, and no passport, your luck buck - no voting for you.

I still say voting should be mandatory to give lazy Bahamians the first thing in life to care about, but if that is too exceptional to be achieved then this method of ‘registering’ voters would be the next best thing to ensure not only participation in the election process, but also the minimisation of voter fraud.

Obviously, groups who have had their right to vote revoked, like convicted felons, are of no concern because either they’re in prison anyway or they can’t get a passport.

Now the Attorney General comes out with a comment as I write this, talking about low voter registration being attributable to concerns about the voting process. She says voters are frustrated and uncertain because they don’t know which ID to use. Well, how come all of a sudden? Either she’s telling stories on the voters, the voters are telling stories on the registry, or the registry is suspicious of registrants. You decide.

If voters are uncertain about which piece of ID to take, then they should take all and be done with it. As a matter of fact, at any given time, any ID should be able to identify your citizenship status.

In America, the standard pieces of identification issued by the federal and state governments will always reveal your citizenship as long as the ID is current.

It may not be stated explicitly, but you can tell from the notations or from the term lengths just who is or isn’t an American citizen.

Having a national registry to avoid parliamentary registry problems is not that hard to make happen if you mean to do it.

But, it does require that you care to do it.

And if we don’t do it, I guess that in itself is an answer to the many problems we face in and beyond the parliamentary registry.

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