Dear Editor,
My letter in your Tuesday’s edition “Keeping voting simple with accuracy and integrity must be a goal of the election process” included a strange lapse in memory on my part. I incorrectly claimed that I personally witnessed Jamaica’s Electronic Voter Identification System (EVIS) at several polling stations as a member of the Carter Center Elections Observer Mission to the 2002 Jamaica elections.
While the 2002 Jamaica election was the country’s first to use electronic identification technology, it was used then, with great fanfare, for registration only and not on voting day. What I did witness was the use of photo ID on poll books to identify voters on polling day, a feature introduced in Jamaica elections for the first time with great success.
EVIS at polling stations was first used in Jamaica in its 2007 election. My mistake apart, there is much Guyana can copy from the Jamaican experience with elections, in particular its culture of continuous improvement and country-over-party. The 2002 election was a landmark election in Jamaica. As a direct outcome of strong and innovative management by Jamaica election officials, the process and the results were the first to be accepted by all political parties. And in Jamaica at the time, that was a revolutionary development.
Sincerely,
Sherwood Lowe
