Director of Elections Danville Walker has requested that all public and private institutions continue to accept the recently-expired national voter identification cards, presented by customers, until new ones are issued by June this year.

According to a statement released yesterday: "The Electoral Commission of Jamaica is advising the public that there has been a six-month extension of the expiry date of the voter identification cards. This means that all voter ID cards, which had the expiry date of December 31, 2007, are now valid until June 30, 2008."

The announcement confirmed a report carried in yesterday's Gleaner.

The statement continued: "Director of Elections Danville Walker is requesting that all public and private sector institutions, inclusive of banks, remittance services and the post offices, continue to accept the cards as valid identification until June 30, 2008, or until the new cards are issued."

However, Joylene Griffiths-Irwin, director of public, corporate and government affairs at the Bank of Nova Scotia, told The Gleaner yesterday afternoon that the institution had not yet been officially informed by the Electoral Office of Jamaica. She said she was unable to say whether the bank would be accepting the expired IDs.

Appropriate response

Mrs. Griffiths-Irwin said the bank would make the appropriate response once it had been officially informed.

Nadine Bryan, retail officer of product banking and development at the National Commercial Bank, said an advisory was sent out to the other branches notifying them to accept the expired ID cards until otherwise advised.

Gordon Brown, public relations manager at the Central Sorting Office (CSO), said the agency was yet to receive notification from the Electoral Office of Jamaica (EOJ), but indicated that it would be accepting the expired ID cards up until the end of the month. He said, however, that, at that point, the CSO would hope to have received documented notification from the EOJ.

Joan-Marie Powell, managing director of the remittance services agency, Western Union, said her company would not be turning away customers with the expired ID cards but would check each ID presented by customers with the EOJ to verify its authenticity.