PREPARATIONS for the forthcoming election have been forced into overtime as officials battle to ensure that a new electoral registration system is in place for polling day.
Politicians have expressed concern around the introduction of automatic voter registration, with thousands of records not included in the initial version of the new system and parish officials described as “tearing their hair out”.
The change in registration procedure enables Islanders who meet the eligibility criteria to vote to be automatically added to the electoral roll, removing the need for manual registration and reducing the human and financial costs to parishes.
However the change has seen delays caused by political debates over whether lists of eligible voters should be available to candidates, and technical issues around the testing of the new system.
Data provided by the States Greffe, the central body providing independent administrative support to the States Assembly, showed that around 71,000 records had been added to the new system by 2 April.
The JEP understands that up to 15,000 records were not included in the initial phase as a result of discrepancies in address data.
The States Greffe said that a further 12,000 records were due to be added to the system by yesterday, while the remaining 3,000 records had been analysed and found to be “false positives” due to discrepancies in how names were listed.
Constable Mike Jackson, chair of the Constables Committee, said there had been daily meetings between parish officials and staff working for the Greffe in a bid to resolve the issue.
“There was an initial discrepancy of several thousand and there’ve been people working into the small hours to address this,” he said. “I am confident that we are moving in the right direction and will be ready by 7 June, but it has caused anxiety among the administrators in the parishes.”
Mr Jackson said that he believed the situation had not been helped by the recent changes made to the electoral system, which he said ran against a code of good practice for elections produced by the Council of Europe, which recommends that any changes should be finalised a minimum of 12 months ahead of polling day.
“It’s us as politicians who have agreed to go along with these changes without understanding the consequences.” he added. “It takes us into dangerous territory when that happens – there are always going to be glitches in any new system and it’s not fair on the staff.”
Deputy Steve Ahier, chair of the Privileges and Procedures Committee, said that the system should have been set up last year to enables the teething issues to be sorted at an earlier stage.
The JEP spoke to two other Constables about the issue, with one claiming that parish staff had been “pulling their hair out” and another stating that “it’s caused unnecessary angst and the parish secretaries are up to their eyes in it”.
There have also been fears that some candidates at the forthcoming election might find that some of the people who had agreed to sign their nomination papers were not on the register. Deputy Ahier recommended that candidates check whether their nominees were correctly registered by contacting parish official prior to the official opening of nominations on Monday 20 April.
In the build-up to the election, an online “look-up” facility is set to be launched on the vote.je website, allowing those with a government digital ID to check their registration online.
The States Greffe also confirmed that polling station managers, known as “autorisés”, will have discretion to allow eligible Islanders to vote on 7 June if they are not part of the Electoral Register.
