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Public won't see election post mortem

Findings of a post mortem on the General Election conducted by the Office of the Parliamentary Registrar will not be released to the public.

"We don't need to share it with the Opposition Leader," said acting Parliamentary Registrar Randolph Scott.

"We don't need to share it with any politicians because there's nothing political about it. We'll share it with the people involved (administratively) in the process."

The news comes as a disappointment to United Bermuda Party leader Grant Gibbons who said yesterday that he intended to discuss the matter with the Parliamentary Registrar and his caucus colleagues.

"The information that we collect from all the persons involved in the electoral process, such as the Returning Officers, Works and Engineering and the Police gave us information back so we could see what we can improve on for next time," Mr. Scott explained.

"Certainly we wouldn't want to inform the public that signage was in the wrong place. That's all internal to us. That's all this process was about. Nothing political about it whatsoever. It's bland stuff."

There were some complaints of irregularities immediately following the July poll, particularly in district 23 or Paget West where at least four people had difficulty voting.

Some people complained they had been incorrectly marked as having voted.

"I'm certainly disappointed and I think it flies in the face of the increasing transparency that was promised by the new PLP Government," Dr. Gibbons said.

"I thought that a post mortem would be very useful given the fact that we had an additional 16 individual polling stations and new boundaries and with the first election under the new boundaries it would be very useful to have a post mortem done and input from members of the public and interested parties and also to have it publicly available."

In August the UBP called for reform of the Parliamentary Election Amendment Act, saying that it was concerned that while Bermuda had over 90 percent of voters registered to vote, a number of them were not registered in the correct constituency.

With smaller sized districts a smaller number of incorrectly registered voters could sway the outcome of a poll.