Register to Vote

June 2000 Table of Contents

REGISTER TO VOTE

The Parliamentary Registration Department is seeking the assistance of Bahamians throughout the nation in its ongoing attempts to update the current three-year-old voters' register.

Parliamentary Commissioner Errol Bethel said today that, specifically, the department is requesting Bahamian citizens in the following three categories to come in:

Those who are 18 years of age and older, and whose names are not on the voters' roll. They should be registered.
Those who have registered, but have relocated into new constituencies. Their registrations should be transferred.
Those who have registered, but whose names have been altered because of marriage or for other reasons. These changes ought to be recorded.

Dealing with persons in the second category, Mr Bethel said that residents who have moved from one constituency to another can vote in a new constituency if they have been living there for at least three months, and have had their transfers effected. If persons do not transfer, they may disenfranchise themselves because it is illegal to go back to an old constituency after six months would have elapsed, he said.

Persons who wish to register, transfer their registration or alter their name should contact the administrators' offices on Abaco. Mr Bethel said they should take with them proof of Bahamian citizenship (eg passports or birth certificates) and should have been resident in the constituency for at least three months.

The Department is legally obliged to keep the voters' register up to date. It tries to do this by tracking deaths and making consequential changes in the list, and by adding names of new voters submitted by Family Island administrators.

"But," Mr Bethel adds, "we can't function without the co-operation of members of the public, and so we are asking them to assist us in making our records current."

He also said 130,000 persons registered for the general election in 1997 and the number on the list at present is about the same, but Mr Bethel reckons there are about 30,000 more eligible persons throughout the country whose names ought to be included as well. The current voters' register came into effect 1st February 1997 and was used for that year's general election.

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