DELAYS in issuing turnout figures for last weekend’s election have been criticised by a political commentator, with official data yet to be shared in the three days since polls closed.
In contrast to previous elections, where “rolling” figures have been available during the day, or issued by the official in charge of each district immediately after results were declared, the task for this year has been assigned to Statistics Jersey, with hope expressed that the necessary data will be available by the end of the week.
Unofficial figures issued by the Policy Centre Jersey indicate that 27,133 Islanders voted in the election, an increase of 1,800 on 2022, equating to 32% of those eligible to vote.
This year’s election was the first carried out under the new automatic voter registration system, which saw all eligible Islanders included on the register and left 84,817 people entitled to vote.
In 2022, prior to the new system’s introduction, only 75% of the estimated 81,000 who were eligible to vote opted to register, with 25,334 votes cast: 31.3% of those eligible to vote.
John Henwood, a political commentator who writes regular columns for the JEP, described the wait of up to an entire working week as “an inordinately long time”.
“The problem apparently is the nature of the electoral system with each parish responsible for its own election mechanisms, and they have to do each district and each area within the district separately, so that would indicate that a centralised system would would be more efficient,” he said.
“How is it that we used to get same-day results when today – with all the advances available in technology it now appears to take nearly a week to find out how many people voted? It doesn’t seem right.”
In recent years, results for each district were published at the polling stations where counts were held. And going back decades, election officials issued figures for each parish to the JEP in mid-afternoon, with this data included in the late afternoon edition of the paper. Figures issued in the JEP on 13 December 1972, when polling stations were open between 11am and 8pm, showed a breakdown for all 12 parishes, including both the number of votes cast and the total electorate.
The Policy Centre study said that the proportion of eligible voters who took part was 32% in Jersey, compared with 40% in Guernsey last year, when 19,700 people voted out of an estimated total of 49.000 who were eligible.
There was a substantial variation in turnout figures between the parishes, from 52.6% in St Mary to just 21.9% in St Helier, repeating the pattern in earlier elections, with much higher turnout in country districts than in the more urban areas.
Jenny Bevis, director of the Policy Centre said: “Automatic registration ensured that almost everyone who was entitled to vote was on the electoral register.
“However, a consequence of this is that people who have no intention of voting are included in the size of the electorate, which deflates the turnout figure. So, Jersey’s official turnout rate of 32% is well below that of all countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.”
