If nothing else, the opposition One Bermuda Alliance’s tabling of an absentee voters Bill has galvanised the Government’s own electoral reforms.

Cabinet Office minister Diallo Rabain held a public meeting this week and has also given more information on the Government’s plans.

It may be that the Government was always planning to launch this consultation now, and there might have been some internal debates and consultations before its launch.

Nonetheless, it is equally plausible that this consultation would not have been launched until at least the new year were it not for the push from the OBA. This is supported by the Progressive Labour Party government having said almost nothing about the reforms since the General Election in February when it promised changes in its platform.

All that was said during the ensuing budget debate – when no money was allocated for the reform effort – was that the Parliamentary Registrar would begin research on changes, data collection would also commence and that a legislative framework would be in place by next September.

It is also noteworthy that while a public meeting was scheduled for Monday at the Harrington Workmen’s Club in Devil’s Hole, there was no consultation paper or background information available, unlike other public consultations.

Beyond the press release announcing the meeting, which contained some basic information on the scope of the reforms, attendees had little to go on.

Thus the OBA appears to have scored some points in being able to move this important and long-overdue reform forward.

The Opposition in this case was right to refuse to withdraw the Bill and join in a collaborative process. While collaboration is often positive, in this case it looks more like an attempt to co-opt the Opposition with nothing to be gained in return.

So, in terms of the politics, the OBA appears to have scored a win.

The more important question concerns the actual reforms, which, to be fair to the Government, are not as simple as saying “give every overseas student a vote”.

The OBA Bill would give registered voters “being ordinarily resident in Bermuda” but temporarily absent from Bermuda for reasons including study, employment, medical treatment, government service or other prearranged travel, the right to cast an absentee ballot provided they had notified the Parliamentary Registrar of their intention up to three weeks before the election date.

The Bill then delegates the responsibility for regulating how absentee voters would be verified and voting administered to the minister responsible, along with the Parliamentary Registrar.

Those regulations would have to determine if voting was to be carried out digitally, as seems likely, and the vetting process would need to be worked out as well. One of the questions is whether three weeks would give the Parliamentary Registrar enough time to verify all absentee voters, who would likely be in the hundreds, if not thousands.

While the OBA’s proposals leave questions about the process unanswered, the Government’s plans are vaguer still, but are also more complicated. They are:

• Implementing absentee voting for eligible Bermudians overseas

• Establishing clear and transparent standards for political parties and campaign financing

• Keeping the voters’ rolls accurate, private and transparent

• Embracing practical modernisation of electoral systems and technology

• Setting consistent and fair rules for polling day administration

On absentee voting, the major concern for both parties is to decide whether the right to vote in a Bermuda General Election should be restricted to those who are ordinarily resident in Bermuda but are overseas to study, work or for another reason.

The greatest risk is that people who remain registered to vote but are not ordinarily resident and have no intention of being resident attempt to cast votes. Given the small size of Bermuda’s constituencies, it would not take very many people to swing a vote in a constituency, if not the whole country. Thorny questions such as whether a Bermudian who might be studying for a second or third degree and lives with a family abroad is still “ordinarily resident” in Bermuda need to be resolved.

Despite these questions, absentee voting should be relatively straightforward. The rest of the PLP reform programme is not. Deciding issues such as campaign financing, different forms of voting, cleaning up the voters’ rolls and setting fair rules for political parties’ conduct are complex and likely to take some time to resolve.

That gives rise to the danger that, intended or not, such a wide-ranging set of reforms – which go beyond what the PLP promised in its platform – will bog down and delay the process of giving absentee voters a ballot.

It would be more straightforward to treat absentee voters as a separate bill while spending longer on the other aspects of electoral reform, which did include a platform proposal to reduce the number of MPs. For whatever reason, that plan seems to have fallen off the agenda.

Thus, it would appear that the OBA was right for political and policy reasons to keep its Bill up for debate. What would make the most sense is for the two parties to collaborate on that aspect of reform and then to turn to the other items.