With the V.I.’s Joint Board of Elections set to meet June 12 at the Gov. Juan F. Luis Hospital on St. Croix, the island’s District Board of Elections met for nearly four hours Wednesday as it laid out a number of items and tasks needing clarification and completion prior to that joint meeting.
As the primary election stands just a mere two months away, one thing proved certain from Wednesday’s session — there is still much work to be done in order to be ready.
As the July 2 deadline to register to vote in the upcoming election nears, the biggest issues still remaining in the coming month, according to Elections officials, are drafting the joint board policies and procedures for the primary and general election while also making sure the sample ballots are prepared legally and correctly, so as not to confuse people.
After the July registration deadline passes, all efforts will focus on ensuring those ballots are ready for Election Day, in addition to the continuation of demonstrations of the new voting equipment and the training of polling place workers.
How the ballots will look and read officially and how the machines will respond to possible voting scenarios were the main topics of discussion throughout Wednesday’s lengthy session.
The consensus among board members appeared to be that more consistency and clarification were still needed as the ballot language and layout is finalized.
“I think we need a group or committee to address how the ballots are going to be prepared because I see on the ballots we’re using for demonstration purposes … the language needs to be corrected,” said St. Croix District Board of Elections Chairman Adelbert Bryan.
“In certain cases, Spanish and English are mixed together and the language is not consistent for certain things.”
Debate also ensued about the correct type of Spanish to use on the ballot so not to alienate any one of St. Croix’s numerous Hispanic ethnicities. As was made clear, certain countries sometimes use different words to describe different things.
Bryan made it clear during the board’s debate on the topic that, for this upcoming election, he wants the ballot language “clarified, corrected and according to V.I. Code.”
“Just be consistent with the statute,” Bryan said at one point. “The code tells us how the ballots are supposed to look.”
What the code doesn’t reflect, though, and as board member Rupert Ross pointed out by calling the code “archaic,” is how the new DS200 voting equipment that’s to be used in the upcoming election actually reads votes.
“The law being read and the issue here is the process of voting. To vote you got to do this, to vote you got to do that,” Ross said. “The process of voting on this DS200 is to insert a piece of paper.”
Ross continued, “When we construct the ballot, it has to be consistent with what the code says, not with something we think the code should say.”
Board member Lisa Harris-Moorhead countered that she was concerned with the code saying that certain language had to appear on the official ballot.
Ross responded. “I’m not disputing that. At the end of the day we are charged with making sense of nonsense sometimes, and sometimes we are challenged when we do that. That’s why the supervisor is in court,” he said. “That’s the process and I’m not intimidated by that as long as we have a sound basis rationale for making the decision.”
“The ballot has to be constructed in accordance with the law,” Ross said. “The voting process is something else.”
Harris-Moorhead said her main concern was educating the public prior to the election, and making sure enough sample ballots and educational measures were taken prior to then to ensure the public knows how to exercise its right to vote.
To that end, the board also reported that from December 2013 to June 1, nearly 700 individuals had already been served islandwide with voting machine demonstrations.
Elections System Supervisor Caroline Fawkes said board members should be prepared to tackle the language and layout issues of the ballots at next week’s joint board meeting so sample ballots could still be delivered by June 17.
Fawkes also responded to a question posed to her at the meeting’s conclusion by someone from the public questioning her working relationship with the district board’s chairman, which the man said had been the topic of recent discussion on V.I. talk radio.
“I have no disrespect to Mr. Bryan nor from Mr. Bryan,” Fawkes said. “I know Mr. Bryan from growing up and what I said at the beginning of the meeting is Mr. Bryan has a right to go to court and I’ve got a right to do what I have to do.”
“It’s nothing personal,” Fawkes continued. “It’s his job and it’s my job. I’m here to do a job by the law and some are going to agree and some won’t.”
