Providenciales, TCI, December 19, 2016 – Ballots for voting in the Turks and Caicos islands are not secret enough and the Elections Observer Mission team on Saturday reported that it is time for a thorough review of the Elections Ordinance now that we have had two of this new style of voting where there are 10 districts and all island candidates district.
“We watch the process very carefully, and the way it’s done would avoid tracing ballots. We understand that the ballot papers are kept under lock and key for a year, and if there’s no election petitions or court cases then destroyed. But we’re just slightly concerned that there may be a perception that because the voter identification number is recorded on the voter ballot paper that it could technically be seen by someone during the count and how they voted identifying them.”
The team of six sent in by the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association visited 19 of the 21 polling stations countrywide and cited that while the workers were through, mostly female and dedicated, there were differences in how polling stations were managed including how signatures were written on the counterfoil of the ballots themselves.
Jim Wells, (MLA) head of the mission was quick to clarify that this did not hamper or compromise the process; he said it was just inconsistent as was the general layout of the voting centers and this slowed things down. The counting process was called transparent but slow, especially when it came to the all island district. And there were things being done which the law says should not have been done, including having Police officers within the polling place.
Wells says quite a bit has been done correctly in the 2016 TCI General Election, and spoke to the excruciatingly long wait for some results. “There was one technical issue that may have failed in the sense that at all polling stations, some voters put their ballot paper in the wrong box. So therefore it wasn’t possible to announce the individual constituency results until you counted the All Island results, because obviously you didn’t know whether there would be enough votes in the All Island box to have an impact on the constituency result. So you can understand the problem there. The second issue of course was that the counting of the All Island result was very long and complex.”
Jim Wells, who is a parliamentarian himself, says due to the type of voting we have in the Turks and Caicos, the results will always take longer than other territories.
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