Dear Editor,
For the last two local government elections I applied to the Elections Commission for a job as temporary election day staff, got trained, did several written assessments and was picked to serve as a Presiding Officer at a small polling station.
There were no difficulties at my station during either of those elections and I thoroughly enjoyed working closely at the polling station with the other polling day staff, including the political agents from the larger parties who were present.
On both occasions, although we met for the first time only a few days before, the Elections Commission staff worked from around 3.00 in the morning to after 10.00 in the night as a team in an atmosphere filled with camaraderie and without any tension whatsoever, which is definitely not a reflection of the larger society from which we were all drawn.
I was a little surprised though that on each occasion I was a Presiding Officer, out of the thousands of polling stations in the country, one of the three (a different one for each election) Government-appointed Commissioners of the Elections Commission in the country came to my polling station to stay for and observe close of poll and counting of votes at the station.
That polling station at Bel Air Primary School where I worked on both occasions is a relatively obscure station and it was one of two separate polling stations at the school. I feel sure that an approximately four-hour visit to it from one of the three Government Commissioners in the country to observe the counting of votes happening twice in succession must either be extremely rare or was an unprecedented occurrence.
There were no issues at my polling station at either election and on both occasions the Commissioners, as well as everyone else present, were happy to sign my poll book at the close of the night’s events. I never had any complaint or query afterwards about the way the polling was conducted.
I applied again in early August 2019 to work as temporary election day staff for these elections and was eventually called to attend training over the course of a weekend in late September 2019 where I wrote assessments that were very similar in content to the ones I had written previously.
Since then, I haven’t heard back from the Elections Commission. With elections less than two weeks away, I decided to call. Unfortunately, when I called, I found out that I hadn’t been selected to work on election day.
Everyone who applies for a temporary election day position does the same training and writes the same assessments and, as far as I know, positions in a polling station ranging from Presiding Officer to Ballot Clerk are staffed on performance in those assessments.
This time around, it seems that despite my experience and my performance at assessments which I believe were comparable each time or a little better on the last occasion, I was not needed to work.
I did not even merit consideration for appointment as a ballot clerk to direct voters how to put their ballot in the box and to assist them with staining their finger or as an information clerk to direct people to their polling station where there is more than one polling station in a polling place.
Since I have been a lawyer for nearly twenty years, am the recipient of two postgraduate degrees in law, neither honorary, have been elected by the lawyers twice to be President of the Bar Association and once to be Vice President, and have past election day experience in two elections as a Presiding Officer without any problem, as the Commissioner who visited in 2018 should be able to testify, I wondered what qualification I lacked or what else could have led to my non-selection.
But no reasons have been given to me to help me understand the decision and the only one I could think about was the accidental fact of my last name, over which I had no control at birth.
Yours faithfully,
Kamal Ramkarran