Danville Walker speaking at The Gleaner's Editors' Forum, last Friday. -Rudolph Brown/Chief Photographer

Growing up in Kingston, young Danville Walker worked in his parents' bakery in his spare time. He, therefore, had a good vantage point from which to observe his seniors' untiring efforts to block the entry of rats, bent on eating their way through the supplies and products.

"You always had to be keeping out rats ... and if you block up this little hole, they find somewhere else to walk; you block up this little hole, they try another little hole, that is how rats are," Walker, now Jamaica's director of elections, reminisced at a Gleaner Editors' Forum last week.

Today he takes the lessons from thwarting rats in his parents' bakery to his job of blocking scoundrels who try to corrupt the electoral system.

"When you solve the problem here, it will migrate to where you are not looking," he stressed. Accordingly, he said, neither the Electoral Office of Jamaica nor the Electoral Commission of Jamaica would be complacent in preparing for the upcoming general election.

Pointing out that the successful party will only need 31 of the 60 seats in parliament to form the next government, he stressed that the polling exercise will be scrupulously conducted in every constituency, no matter how dominant one party has been in that constituency, historically.

"We have made tremendous headway; the voters' list is not an issue in Jamaica (anymore); the quality of the election day workers is vastly improved; you no longer have enumeration exercises where the enumerator is the same person who is the presiding officer doing the same work, marking out the ballots. No ballot boxes are stolen in our election, no ballot boxes are stuffed in our election!" he asserted confidently.