Who is popular today?

THE EDITOR: It has become clear that the Elections and Boundaries Commission needs some serious reform.
Firstly, let me congratulate the UNC on their sweeping victory. Unfortunately, I have to say apparently because we have a serious lack of information on what happened at election night.
The events on the night of April 28 were extremely strange. Results were coming in extremely slowly from the EBC. No results at all from Diego Martin, Port of Spain, Laventille or Arima. Then suddenly at 10 pm, the PNM concedes the election announcing they have won as few as 10 seats. Meanwhile, every news organisation has huge blank swathes on their electoral maps and very few numbers.
On April 29, the EBC disclosed preliminary constituency results. We have total results, belatedly released, but no idea how the votes were distributed seat-wise.
The fact is if the outcome was reversed ie the UNC conceded at 10 pm and the PNM declared the winner with no numbers we would be protesting and calling the election rigged. It is the only fact that the UNC win is keeping people calm since obviously, the party out of power cannot rig the election.
Given the lack of results from the election, we can draw two possible conclusions, one charitable and one uncharitable.
The charitable conclusion is the EBC is short-staffed and operates on outdated systems. There should be a review of how EBC publishes its data to the public and the media. Perhaps for the election night, EBC should have its own broadcasting media centre and website that disseminates the results as they come in.
If the Americans/Canadians/British with their millions of voters can publish real-time results, I don’t see why we are unable to do so. We cannot claim to be any sort of modern country if voting results are shrouded in mystery. The uncharitable conclusion is that the EBC doesn’t care about releasing results beyond its legal mandate. The public is irrelevant, and it is only the politicians that need to know the results. Or worse, that the results of the election for certain constituencies were deliberately held back for reasons unknown. I’ll say no more about that but it should be known that lack of numbers is causing rumours and conspiracy theories online and that is not healthy for this country.
Even if it is not legally required, it is functionally required that the available results be made public on election night. And if they are not readily available then systems should be put to make them available. This country needs more transparency, not less.
via e-mail
Emile Enightoola
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