Voters' List

The Voters’ List Will Never Be Cleaned Up – By Don Mitchell

Dear Mr Editor,

I was going to send you the letter below for anonymous publication.  It is written satirically.  It is my effort to understand and to explain through satire why the administration is attempting to pass the new Elections Bill, while secretly and surreptitiously omitting from it the Voters’ List and campaign financing reforms recommended by the CERC.  

It is written from the point of view of an imaginary, long-serving Member of the Anguilla House of Representatives.  I imagine him giving his reasons for not accepting the reforms of cleaning up the Voters’ List and regulating campaign spending, and for keeping quiet about leaving out these reforms from the Bill for a new Elections Act published on the government website for discussion.

But, I have been persuaded that the letter by itself would be counter-productive.  It is said that many Anguillians don’t do figures of speech.  They read irony and sarcasm literally.  Metaphors and similes, it seems, cause them confusion.  Double entendre, even in calypso, is lost on literal-minded people.  That is what happens to the brains of people who believe the fantastical fables of the Old Testament to be literal truth.  It seems that sadly we have a lot of those in Anguilla.

So, to avoid misunderstanding, I am happy to let your readers know that I have written the anonymous letter below.

Yours sincerely,

Don Mitchell

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“Dear Editor,

Don Mitchell is an idiot.  Whatever made him think we would allow the List to be cleaned up?  Does he have any idea how many years, decades, I have struggled to get family and friends who live in the USA onto the List, so they can come to Anguilla at election time to vote for me?  I have children born in the USA.  They have never resided in Anguilla.  But they come to vote for me whenever I buy them a ticket.  He wants to tell me my own children are not qualified to vote for me?  I will never agree to that.

It gets worse.  He says that under the Constitution my children were never qualified to be on the List in the first place, as they never resided here.  And, now he wants to make it even more difficult for me to get them on the List by saying they have to be “ordinarily resident”?  That means they have to live and work in Anguilla before they can get on the List.  How does he expect me to win the next election, if all my family and friends who live overseas are taken off the List?  Is he crazy?

Does he have any idea how much money I have invested over the past decades to get these supporters on the List?  Does he know how I had to beg and solicit funds to be able to pay to win my seat?  I paid for my supporters to fly in to Anguilla and fill out the form to be put on the List in the first place.  Every election I pay for them to fly in to Anguilla to vote for me.  And, now I must waste all that money and effort I have invested, and have to start all over again?  Never happen!

Ten years ago we managed to get the old system of periodic enumeration replaced by the present system of continuous registration.  Under the old system every five years the old Voters’ List was abandoned, and the new one was prepared from scratch.  We and the Opposition both agreed the old system was cumbersome and expensive.  We knew that once we could trick the electoral office into registering all our disqualified supporters, and we abolished the enumeration process, they could never be removed from the List until they died.  Even after they died, we could keep them on for years more.  Now he wants us to abandon all that investment and face the uncertainty of a cleaned up List?  No way!

We incumbent politicians love our Voters’ List.  Leave our Voters’ List alone!

And, no, we are not going to the public to explain anything to them.  Anguillians don’t want to know.  They are mushrooms; they like being kept in the dark.

Yours Sincerely,”

[Name of the author withheld at his request]

Latest Disappointments

Latest Disappointments in Electoral Reform – Letter to the Editor of The Anguillian Newspaper

Dear Mr Editor,

Your readers will be aware that government has now published on its website a Bill for an Elections Act, 2019 (the 2019 Bill). http://www.gov.ai/documents/Elections%20Act%202019%20-%20BILL%20Final%20for%20consultation.pdf.  I have to register my disappointment at this attempt by government to sneak this 2019 Bill into law.  I invite everyone to have a look at the table of contents at the beginning of the document if you do not have the time to read the entire 2019 Bill.

This is supposed to be Government’s effort to bring into effect the election-related recommendations of the 2017 Report of the Constitutional and Electoral Reform Committee (the 2017 Report).  But, the 2019 Bill omits two of the most sincerely desired and widely welcomed reforms to our elections procedure recommended by the 2017 Report.  These were: (1) the revision of the Voters’ List by holding a new enumeration, and repeating it every ten years; and (2) introducing into our elections procedure for the first time provisions for campaign financing regulation.  We can’t revise the Voters’ List and clean it up unless the law provides for enumeration to be held periodically.  We can’t prevent vote-buying unless the law obliges politicians to publish their accounts.  Under the recommendations of the 2017 Report, all politicians and political parties were going to be required under heavy penalties to publish their audited financial statements in a timely fashion.

I say “sneak into law” because of the applicability of Mr Hubert Hughes’ well known aphorism.  He said, “If you want to keep something secret from Anguillians, most of whom do not read, you have only to write it down on paper and put the paper in front of them.  They will never read it.”  In Anguilla, to be transparent and accountable about some important new proposal, it is necessary to talk to the people and explain what you propose.  It is not sufficient merely to write it down and put the paper on a website and never speak openly about it.

Government has now held its first public meeting on Tuesday May 14 to present the 2019 Bill to the public.  This was at St Augustine’s Anglican Church at East End.  I was away from Anguilla, and was not able to attend the consultation.  But, a perusal of an article in the 17 May Anguillian Newspaper appears to show that none of the government representatives at the consultation took the opportunity to explain what was being proposed (by way of deviating from the major recommendations).

In addition to being a betrayal of Anguillian expectations, I believe this 2019 Bill is contrary to what our government promised Lord Ahmad (the British Minister for the Overseas Territories) would be the way going forward.  Lord Ahmad, it will be recalled, gave in to government’s request to urgently introduce by Order in Council the constitutional and electoral changes taken from the 2017 Report that they wanted done immediately.  In exchange, government agreed that they would thereafter turn their attention to implementing the remainder of the constitutional and electoral reform proposals set out in the 2017 Report.  Government promised Lord Ahmad that they would enact ALL of the major constitutional and electoral reform proposals, save where they secured the approval of Anguillians to making any variation.  Government appears not to be living up to that promise.

All well-intentioned Anguillians must demand that the Attorney-General’s Chambers incorporate in the 2019 Bill the omitted recommendations for cleaning up the Voters’ List and for introducing campaign financing regulation.  The sections have already been drafted in the main part following best practice elsewhere in the Caribbean and can easily be incorporated.  Only bad faith with the Anguillian public would cause the provisions to continue to be left out.

If your readers consider this matter important enough, they will make their views known at any future “town hall” meeting and at every other opportunity and through every medium until government accedes to the wishes of the people.  They might indicate their dissatisfaction directly to their elected representatives.  Letters, emails, telephone calls, WhatsApp and other electronic messages to their elected representatives will help.  A quiet word at the Post Office, in the supermarket, or outside church on Saturday or Sunday mornings would not hurt.  Hopefully, government will as a result of public pressure come to its senses and do the right thing.

If any of your readers should have any question on any of this, they should not hesitate to contact me by email at idmitch@anguillanet.com.