His Excellency, President Charles Savarin, is said to have agreed to a meeting with Opposition and UWP leader, Linton Lennox. The anticipated meeting is expected to resolve the current impasse between the ruling DLP government and the UWP opposition. Linton will be accompanied by former PM Edison James, UWP President Isaac Baptiste, Attorney Gildon Richards, and UWP La Plaine candidate Fransisca Joseph.
Considering that the demand for electoral reforms has dominated public opinion and fueled public unrest in the opposition, it is anticipated that it will form the agenda of the meeting with the president.
Edison James said conducting a free and fair election on December 6 without election reforms is very uncertain. In his experience as former prime minister, James said the general coming election must be postponed to facilitate necessary reforms to the voting register. He said postponing the election date will enable the Chief Election Officer and the entire Electoral Commission to prepare the register for transparent voting.
A former UWP leader himself, James the constitution stipulates that elections must hold within three months of dissolving the parliament, meaning that the election could be fixed up to February 2020. Within that space of time, he said, the electoral commission can provide people with photo ID cards such as driver’s license, international passports, and social security cards among others for election purposes.
“The Chief Elections Officer can decide to use the IDs that people have now as the form of identification for our voters,” James said. “And that is something that we can make a declaration and announce to the people and get it in place. That doesn’t require a whole lot of time. So, these two things [postponement of election date and issuance of ID cards] should be taken care of.”
In the event that the electoral office cannot postpone the election date or issue identification cards, James said the electorates can head to the court to get a reprieve. He cited a case law where Ghana, a West African country, got the courts to issue an order for postponement of elections date in 2016 so that the voters register can be cleaned.
The High Court in Ghana ordered that names of deceased people, the underaged, and those who registered using their national insurance cards be removed from the voters register before fixing elections date; and the electoral commission complied accordingly. James further cited instances in St. Kitts and Barbados where went from the High Court to the Appeal Court to get election dates postponed so that the electors list may be put in proper order.
The former national leader said it might not be necessary for the electorates to head to court if President Savarin would order for the election to be moved from December 6 to early next year for necessary reforms to take place.
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