Edmond Campbell, Senior News Coordinator
THE JAMAICA Labour Party (JLP) is threatening a major national protest if attempts are made to call a general election on the current voters' list which it has deemed flawed.
"If anything like that is attempted, then our protest is going to resound from Morant Point to Negril Point," Senator Dwight Nelson, Opposition Spokesman on Information, told The Gleaner yesterday.
Senator Nelson said claims by the Electoral Office of Jamaica (EOJ) that the June 16 list was the cleanest ever were inaccurate, as checks by the JLP have revealed grave deficiencies in the published list.
However, Director of Elections Danville Walker is maintaining that the list is more than 99 per cent error-free with respect to persons who have been verified.
According to Sen. Nelson, the JLP has rejected the existing voters' list on the basis that the names of hundreds of persons who were reverified have been deleted.
"In one constituency, there are over 600 persons whose names do not appear on the list, but were reverified," he said.
GRAVE ERROR
The JLP Information Spokesman said investigations have also revealed the names of dead persons on the new voters' list.
"The Standing Committee of the JLP has mandated its representatives on the EAC to take our complaints to the next meeting of the EAC to determine what is the status of these persons who have been left off the voters' list," he added.
Walker yesterday conceded that names of dead persons might still be on the current list, noting that, of the 64,000 persons on the voters' list reported as being deceased, the EOJ had been able to verify and remove about 45,000.
Walker said the EOJ would continue to verify the remaining 19,000 reported as being dead. "Until we verify that they are dead, we will not remove them from the voters' list," he said.
Defending the published list, Walker said the EAC, which comprises representatives of both political parties as well as independent members, had made the decision to publish the voters' list on June 16. He said if names were inadvertently omitted during the reverification exercise, the director of elections, under the Representation of the People Act, had the power to add those names to the new list.
