With the district and island-wide elections in Anguilla this month, June, the Central Electoral Office has intensified its educational programme to ensure that the electorate is well knowledgeable about the use of the voting machines.
The Supervisor of Elections, Mr. Rodney Rey, his Deputy, Mrs. Maria Hughes, the Returning Officers and their teams, have just undertaken a second return to the seven electoral districts to demonstrate the use of the voting or tabulation machines.
Members of the voting public have also shown a greater interest in operating one of the machines which has been dedicated to the series of training sessions. The equipment, described as “user friendly”, provides feedback to persons inserting a ballot paper as to where they went wrong, permits them to withdraw the document. While a number of persons made mistakes, many others have used the machine correctly with their ballot quickly processed much to their delight.
There are twenty other machines at the Central Electoral Office for use in the elections. They were funded by the Governments of the UK and Anguilla – and will be rolled out at the various polling stations on elections day to make the voting process quicker and more efficient.
The Central Electoral Office in Anguilla came into contact with the electronic voting process in the British Virgin Islands where district and island-wide elections were successfully held. Since then, Anguilla held a mock election exercise which went very well. The hope is that the system will work flawlessly when the actual voting is held later this month.
In the meantime, the Central Electoral Office is continuing its call to members of the electorate to register and to collect their Registration Cards as soon as possible. The Card is to make the voting process quicker rather than having to search the time-consuming printed voter lists at the polling stations – while large numbers of voters stay in the lines in the hot sun.
