Elections officer for the Public Service Association (PSA) Versil Wright said yesterday’s election for the new executive of the union had a hiccup. Voters’ names were not on the list even though they were present with pay slips and membership cards, she said. She added that the results would not be available yesterday since an investigation would have to be done into the discrepancy.
In a telephone interview with the T&T Guardian yesterday, Wright said the list of voters had been given to her by the association through general secretary Nixon Callender. Approximately 16,000 voters were registered to vote in yesterday’s elections.
Because of the problems experienced, Wright said, she waived some of the rules and decided to treat with such voters as special electors. Those votes, she said, would be tallied after those in the ballot boxes were counted and after verifying they were legitimate voters. Voting for the new team to lead the union began at 7 am yesterday and ended at 4.30 pm. Voters cast their ballots at the 61 stations throughout T&T, 38 fixed and 23 roving.
Asked if that had anything to do with previous reports of irregularities, Wright said she could not pronounce on that. Last week, a T&T Guardian report highlighted that the Defenders slate called for an investigation into voter-padding. The Defenders’ presidential candidate Raymond Butler said then: “We had to file an injunction to have them produce an electoral list of voters and we had less than two weeks to examine the list.
“Upon examination we discovered that there were people who were named on the list who would have either retired or taken VSEP (Voluntary Separation of Employment) from WASA and there are over 730 people who took VSEP and we are seeing their names appearing on the list. “There are discrepancies where people with no membership numbers apparently were given temporary numbers to vote and we are uncertain when and how many were assigned.”
Wright also said she received the list of voters too late, a week before the election. She said she tried to accommodate some people who might have been hampered from voting by requesting an extension of the deadline for voting to 6 pm but not all employers agreed to it. Calls to outgoing president Watson Duke yesterday went unanswered.