With care, ECJ

WE HOPE that it is accepted in the spirit in which it is offered, including our wish that the public’s admiration for its ability to avoid being dragged into the partisan fray isn’t blemished.

So, our advice to the Electoral Commission of Jamaica (ECJ) is to avoid being lured into the business of prognosticating, or making public declarations on national election outcomes, except for what is required within the narrow confines of the law. The commission should tack close to what it has grown excellent at over the past 45 years: the management of elections and advising the Jamaican Government on the technical parameters within which they should be conducted.

Hopefully, now that the councils of the parish-based municipalities, as well as that for city municipality of Portmore, have been sworn in (except for those seats that may still be subjected to magisterial recounts), the ECJ will move past what was perhaps a lexical slip and get back to its core operations. Jamaicans, at the same time, should be holding the local governments to account for delivering the services for which they are responsible.

The i sland has 13 parish-based municipal authorities, including the one for the twinned parishes of Kingston and St Andrew. Then there is Portmore, though part of the parish of St Catherine, is the only municipality with a directly elected mayor. Portmore seven municipal councillors, excluding the mayor, are simultaneously members of the St Catherine Municipal Corporation.

Despite the low voter turnout (26.6 per cent), the result of the municipal elections held 12 days ago have attracted substantial interest, in part because people are looking to them for insights into what will happen in the parliamentary election due in 18 months.

CLOSE OUTCOMES

The outcomes were close. Both the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP), which controls the national government, and the Opposition, the People’s National Party (PNP), claimed victory.

The JLP’s argument was that it won seven of the municipal councils. The PNP’s counter was that it, too, won seven, plus the popular vote. It also increased its municipal divisions nationally.

Unsurprisingly, many people wanted from the ECJ a definitive declaration on the outcome of the vote, which, despite the long-standing approach of treating local government polls as a single event, are in fact 14 discrete elections, when the balloting for the mayor of Portmore is taken into account.

Initially, the Electoral Office of Jamaica (EOJ), the ECJ’s operating arm, through the director of elections, Glasspole Brown, rightly skirted those pressures. The EOJ gave the results in specific divisions.

People with interest could, if they wished, do the maths themselves and draw their own conclusions.

A week ago public pressure apparently told on the ECJ, or more likely it acquiesced to internal public relations advice. It issued a table of the seat counts for each parish municipality, and the party that won most in each.

Said the ECJ’s statement: “With all the ballots counted, the result is that the JLP won the election for the control of the local government authorities with seven local authorities, inclusive of the Portmore municipality.”

But there was also the case of the Kingston and St Andrew Municipal Corporation (KSAMC), where the parties tied with 20 seats each. The PNP won the popular vote in that municipality.

EIGHTH SCHEDULE

As the ECJ pointed out, when that happens, the eighth schedule of the Representation of the People Act (ROPA) requires that principal election returning officer of the parish, who presides over the election of the chairman at the first meeting of the council, has a casting vote which must be exercised “in favour of the councillor who has the support of the majority of the councillors who are members of the political party that received the majority of votes cast in the area within the jurisdiction of the municipal corporation in the preceding election”.

The other party gets the deputy chairmanship. Importantly, however, in the event of ties the chairman, under the law, has a casting vote. That, in the case of the KSAMC, gives the PNP “control” of the council, including of the budget and committee assignments.

There are many things that the ECJ will need to talk about. We, though, would suggest that when it comes to broad questions of winning and losing elections, especially in circumstances where partisans are needling for advantage and the issues are open to myriad interpretations, that the ECJ sticks to data. Let the numbers, and the specific words of the legislation speak for themselves as they did with respect to the section on ROPA quoted by the ECJ, dealing with how seat ties in municipal elections are resolved.

Except for the partisans on either side who claimed advantage from the ECJ’s words, no serious damage was done by this slight misstep with its choice of vocabulary.

Importantly, the ECJ did its job of delivering credible elections, over which, despite their closeness, there are no fundamental disputes. The next step, therefore, is to extract the promised value from this element of Jamaica’s democracy: quality performance from the elected councillors.