Jamaica Chamber of Commerce joins call for cleansing of voters' list

 

The Jamaica Chamber of Commerce is calling for a comprehensive and timely updating of the voters' list to enhance confidence in the electoral process amid the low voter turnout recorded at Wednesday's general election. 

 

The turnout was 39.5% from the voters' list of more than two million names.

 

Speaking with Radio Jamaica News on Friday, JCC President Phillip Ramson said the low turnout should not be considered in a vacuum.

 

"So if you take from say 2016 election of 48%, I believe the voters' list was about 1.3 million. And in 2020, when we had a 38% and they blamed it on COVID, the voters' list was actually 1.7 million. And now we have a voters' list, I think, of a little over 2 million and we're 39%. So I think that we need to really look at our voters' list to see how accurate that is. And I hear reports of people who are maybe on there that are no longer here, who have passed away, or maybe not even living in the country. So I think we need to make sure that we have an accurate voters' list because

it's giving us the impression that people are not interested in democracy or they're not interested in voting," he asserted.

 

Jamaica Labour Party campaign spokesperson Dr. Dana Morris Dixon, speaking at a press conference on Thursday, said the voter turnout data shows that for decades, only just over 30% of the population has consistently voted. She said this should be examined from several different angles.

 

"Data tells one kind of snapshot of the story. You have to look at it through many different lenses, and I think it's important that we do that. It's important that we also acknowledge that there are about 100,000 more people that voted than 2020. That is something that is good. As we look at the voter turnout data, though, I want to remind everyone that we need to look at it in a much more broader sense so that we actually take away from it what it is really telling us," Dr. Morris Dixon stressed.

 

JLP General Secretary Dr. Horace Chang and the Observer Mission of the Organization of American States, which was invited to monitor Wednesday's general election, have suggested that the voters' list is in need of cleansing.

 

Political analyst Howard Mitchell, who agrees that there should be a re-verification of the voters' list, has also proposed that the two main political parties can help to improve voter participation by ensuring their supporters are enumerated.