Elections Office: every signature in port petition must be verified

The Elections Office will need to individually verify every single signature on the cruise port referendum petition before a vote can take place.

Elections supervisor Wesley Howell said staff would go door-to-door in an effort to check every name on the petition against the electoral roll.

Speaking at a public meeting Thursday night, Howell outlined the procedure that would take place once the referendum campaigners submit their list of names to the Elections Office.

Though several campaigners complained the process sounded onerous, Howell said the Elections Office had performed the same process for more than 20,000 electors prior to the ‘one man, one vote’ referendum in 2012 in less than four months. On that basis, he said verifying approximately 5,300 signatures on a petition could take a matter of weeks.

He said he had already alerted the Deputy Governor that a request for supplementary funding may be necessary to activate the Elections Office and recruit temporary staff ahead of a potential national poll.

Campaigners announced last week that they had hit their target and it is understood they plan to present their petition to the Elections Office next week.

Howell, who answered questions from the public for more than an hour at a meeting at the Town Hall in George Town, said the office would then begin the process of verifying the signatures.

“Once that process is done and if the 25 percent threshold is crossed the petition is sent to Cabinet,” he said.

Cabinet is then responsible for determining if the other aspects of Section 70 of the Cayman Islands Constitution – the provision which deals with people-initiated referenda – have been met. The section simply states that such referenda must be on issues of “national importance” and must not contravene the Bill of Rights.

Howell acknowledged Cayman was entering new territory with this referendum and said the only guiding legislation came from the short wording in the Constitution itself.

If the petition is verified and Cabinet accepts that the requirements of Section 70 have been met, he said a specific referendum bill would have to be drafted and voted on in the Legislative Assembly.

That bill would likely set the question, the date and the terms of the referendum.

Once that is done, the Elections Office, which is answerable to the governor, takes over and is responsible for organising the poll.

The Elections Office also issued the following statement:

The process towards the People Initiated Referendum involves the following stages:

• The staff of the Elections Office will conduct an independent verification of the petition signatures, in accordance with constitutional requirements under Section 90 and Section 70 (1) (b) of the referendum.
  • Election Office officials will ensure the provided referendum signatures corresponds with the current electoral register
  • As part of the verification method under the law, manual checks will also be conducted by Election Office officials with each petitioner to ensure signature validity.

If the verification process confirms that the level of signatures meets or exceeds the required 25% (5,289) of persons registered as electors (21,155) in accordance with section 90:

• Pursuant to Section 70, the Cabinet will consider constitutional provisions, and if Cabinet is satisfied that those requirements are met a bill will be drafted to support the Referendum, setting out the terms and requirements of the referendum.
• Once a bill is passed in the LA, and gazetted, His Excellency the Governor will appoint Returning Officers and issue the WRIT of the Referendum.

The Referendum voting and counting process will follow a similar process to that of a General Election, including the following:

• Postal Voting
• Mobile Voting
• Polling Day (Referendum Day)
• Voting in all 19 Electoral Districts (7am to 6pm)
• Constitutionally only registered voters are allowed to vote in a referendum.

From the issuance of the WRIT, based on previous referendums, the process is expected to take approximately 10 weeks, which will allow the Elections Office time to prepare staff, materials and carry out the referendum process including postal ballots.