THE IRRATIONALITY OF THE BAHAMIAN VOTER

Last week, there was a remarkable exchange in the press.  One day the Attorney General Allyson Gibson got in the paper and said that the reason she thought people were not registering is because they were confused about the procedures.  The next day the Parliamentary Commissioner Sherlyn Hall got in the press and said he didn’t think that was so.  Such is where we are in The Bahamas. What a minister says in The Bahamas does not mean squat. The Parliamentary Elections Act mandates that in order to get registered you need to produce a passport.  That is the issue.  Tens of thousands don’t have passports and can’t afford to get one.  They have registered and voted in previous elections and notwithstanding that they have an old voter’s card, they are not being allowed to register with that alone.  All the talk about it has people frightened off.  Now we do agree with the Commissioner that yes some people are not interested in getting registered but that is a malaise that will correct itself as election time gets closer.   We think that the provision in the Parliamentary Elections Act which calls for a passport to register is unconstitutional.  Almost surely it is.  What the constitution says is that you must be a Bahamian citizen.  You cannot then impose a condition on someone who is born in the Bahamas and has a valid birth certificate and his parents were married and are Bahamian an artificial condition like getting a passport.  Instead of Fred Smith and that stupid group of fellows around him wasting time on foolishness, they need to take that up in the courts.  The Bahamian people though are really quite funny.  They say they are not interested in the election.  Rodney Moncur, acting the usual part of the political clown that he is, says he is leading a campaign for people to sit out on the beach on election day, so dissatisfied are they with the state of the electorate.  That’s fine.  He deserves to sit on the beach. He is amongst those who make politics as cynical as it is.  The irony is this: right now you have Bahamians raising hell in a false controversy about Chinese fishing in The Bahamas.  The dumb asses don’t even know what the hell they are talking about but they think Chinese are gonna take over. Bullshit.  But we bet you, the buggers aren’t registered to vote.  So if the governing party is minded to do it and allow the Chinese into fish, and they are not mined, but if they did, what could these apathetic voters do about it.  Diddly squat.