Priorities of the Elections Commission:Stymying people’s sovereignty through bureaucratic nitpicking

By C. A. Chandraprema-December 21, 2017, 10:05 pm 

It was with interest that I read Prof. Ratnajeevan Hoole’s recent article in The Island, "Duties of Election Commission: A proactive or bureaucratic stand?" Prof. Hoole is one of the three members of the Elections Commission. Indeed this would be a question on many people’s minds at this moment given the rejection of many nomination lists filed by political parties for the forthcoming local government election. With regard to the rejection of the Maharagama nomination list of the Podujana Peramuna ostensibly on the grounds that it does not have the required number of women candidates, what we hear is that the list has the requisite number of women but that the gender of one female candidate had been inadvertently entered as male on the list.

Even though this had been pointed out to the returning officer, he had rejected the list nevertheless. It was said that the Weligama list of the Podujana Peramuna had not been handed in by the authorized person. According to a party leader of the JO, what had happened in that instance was that the authorized person - a politician - had come to hand in the nomination papers with a lawyer and he had handed in the first file and then been distracted by an official sitting nearby and the lawyer who had accompanied him had handed in the other file and that is what is being interpreted as ‘not having been handed in by an authorised person’. While it is certainly true that nomination papers should be handed in correctly, one has to ask oneself whether it is reasonable to reject a nomination paper on grounds such as those mentioned above.

This is the people’s sovereignty that we are talking about. Even though the Elections Commission exists to facilitate elections and the expression of this sovereignty, instances such as these give one the impression that they are waiting to find some excuse however flimsy to reject nomination papers and thereby stymie that very sovereignty they are supposed to uphold. It would stand to reason that a nomination paper should be rejected only in instances where there is a major error which cannot be corrected before the close of the nominations. Prof. Hoole has said in the article mentioned above that a new Election Commission was appointed in Nov. 2015, and that "It is the Commission’s immense responsibility to establish strong norms of governance as precedents for future Commissions". In that respect, the latest spate of rejections leaves much to be desired.

Referring apparently to the rejection of the Maharagama nominations list the Elections Commissioner was shown on TV explaining that while the names of the candidates were written in one column the gender was written in another column and the Elections Commission in checking whether the required number of women candidates have been included in the nomination list looks only at the column on which the gender is stated and not at the column on which the names of the candidates are written and besides, that there are many names used by both men and women such as Kumudu and that it is not possible to judge by name whether a person is male or female.

That, however, is not the point. The point is that if a nomination paper has the required number of women candidates even though the gender of one of the candidates has been inadvertently misstated in the nomination paper should that list be rejected? The requirement in the law is that it should have a certain number of women in it and that requirement has been met. In such circumstances to reject a nomination paper on the grounds that the gender of one candidate has been inadvertently misstated in the gender column can only be interpreted as bureaucratic nit picking. After all, every candidate on the nominations list is a male or female by self proclamation. Nobody has actually examined them to ascertain that they are actually what they claim to be. Therefore if the person handing in a nomination paper states that a particular candidate is female even though the gender column has misstated her gender as male that should be sufficient for the returning officer to accept the nomination paper. It should not be necessary to go to courts to get a minor error like that rectified. It is important to allow commonsense also to play a role in safeguarding the peoples’ sovereignty.

It is, no doubt, necessary to ensure that the contesting parties do not hand in faulty nomination papers. To ensure accuracy, a system of substantial fines for minor errors would be more appropriate without outright rejection. The only matters going before courts should be matters that are serious enough to be dealt with by courts. This practice of rejecting nominations lists has given rise to a culture of opponents trying to use this means to knock out the other side even before the contest begins by raising piddling issues in the paperwork submitted. The Elections Commission will have to decide whether they are running elections or a fill-in-the-blanks contest. Prof. Hoole a member of the Elections Commission himself has likened the attitude of Elections Commission officials to the little boy who was told by his mother to wear a particular shirt to school and the latter had gone to school wearing only that shirt because he had not been specifically told to wear trousers.

Elections officers would need to be reminded that their duty is to hold elections, and that the nomination paper is what enables people to contest those elections and that they should never be rejected without a good cause. Given the fact that this time the system of election has been changed completely, there should have been greater leeway given to correct minor errors in the paperwork without rejecting them outright.