PNM people guilty of voter padding

Hollow politics and slow justice

It has taken more than a decade for the court to throw out, for want of prosecution, 28 charges of voter padding in the 2000 gene­ral election. The decision re-opens a politically driven chapter, now only dimly recalled, and also gives fresh impetus to concerns about the hopelessly slow and unproductive processes of Trinidad and Tobago justice.

When the voter-padding arrests were made and charges laid, the conduct of elections was a hot focus of political contestation. The People’s National Movement (PNM) made voter padding a cornerstone of its political campaign, with its spokespersons claiming with absolute certitude that the United National Congress (UNC) adminis­tration was plotting to undermine the democratic process and steal the general election. On that basis, both the public and the accused were entitled to expect timely court hearings.

It is thus scandalous that, only in April 2013, a magistrate finally dismissed the cases, with accused persons having been made to appear more than 30 times without prosecutors ever presenting any evidence. So it appears the proof which PNM leaders like Diego Martin North/East MP Colm Imbert claimed to have was never presented to the investigators, which means the voter-padding claims were, at best, a figment of someone’s imagination; or, at worst, a political strategy created by the PNM out of whole cloth to undermine the UNC.

In this regard, it is telling that, in 2007, two persons were in fact convicted of making a false declaration to the Elections and Boundaries Commission for the specific purpose of voter padding, but 52-year-old Judy Joseph and her 29-year-old daughter, Aleena, turned out to be PNM supporters. The PNM understandably never commented on that verdict, not even to warn their supporters against such acts, and it remains to be seen whether the party will now apologise to the 28 persons, most, if not all, of whom had never faced any court matter in their lives and who have for over a decade stood accused of trying to cheat in the electoral process.

It also remains to be satisfactorily explained by the judiciary—but will probably never be—why the magistrate’s decision on Monday to stop the rot could not have been taken, say, the 15th time those cases were called, maybe six years ago.
This is another clear-cut instance in which the administration of justice has been brought into disrepute—in this case, with the connivance of politicians whose claims should have been treated more sceptically. Not only have the accused persons been defamed, inconvenienced, put to expense and even traumatised, but the public would have also found cause to be cynical and even terminally distrustful of the administration of justice.

Express