While the floods may cause some voters not to come out, COVID-19 will essentially disenfranchise plenty of others. Active COVID cases up to newstime are at 1,773 - and most of those positive persons are registered voters. Before he left office, Prime Minister Dean Barrow insisted that anyone testing positive will not be allowed to vote. But, as you just heard, the Leader of the Oppositions is encouraging positive persons to ignore that caution and even the UDP Party Leader accepts that there's nothing to really stop COVID positive persons from voting.
We asked the Chief Elections Officer her thoughts on this, and on how they plan on ensuring the safety of those who do go out to vote.
Josephine Tamai, Chief Elections Officer, Elections and Boundaries
"We are trying our best; we do not know from time to time people have to go into quarantine some yes because they are positive others because they are not. We also know we have persons who are positive but have not gotten tested so, based on the whole situation, yes, we wish that things would have been different but those things are beyond our control so we have to learn how to adjust to what nature brings to us."
Jules Vasquez:
"How stringently will we be able to observe those COVID19 protocols we have seen being promoted all over the place?"
Josephine Tamai
"Well Jules when it comes to that I will tell you that we need to ask the support of everybody, both the public officers and the voters. In terms of public officers, we are ensuring that the public officers and yes, it is law that they must wear their face mask and we are also ensuring that everybody who enters that polling station is being sanitized, so you can't go and say, okay, well I just sanitized my hands so I don't need to get sanitized again the sanitizing officer will still insist you are being sanitized prior to you going into that polling station. When you go into the polling station and you identify yourself, your name will be marked off the register once we have verified that you are who you say you are, we have the binders there to verify the persons as well. When you remove your mask for like 10 seconds just to verify and to say that is Jules because you know sometimes when we have face mask your features don't necessarily show that that's the person, we don't recognize persons sometimes again your hand will be re-sanitized before you actually dip your finger into the electoral ink and before you get that ballot paper and the sanitized pencil for you to use so we are putting in protocols so we are asking person to please ensure that you follow these protocols strictly."
Later tonight, the update number of active cases will be released by the Ministry of Health, giving a more accurate idea of how many people may, or should not be able to vote tomorrow.
