More than two months after the elections, the Transparency along with the Bahrain Human Rights Societies came out with their Elections Report yesterday in which they affirmed – basically – that the elections were “free and fair”. No reservations. No pointing out the obvious. But even condoned the use of the General Voting Centers which have caused the single most important objection to the elections, along with the “floating 8,000 votes” originally claimed by Salman bin Sager Al-Khalifa, and confirmed by some creative maths by some observers.
Why didn’t they point at least one finger specifically at culprits? Well, they “couldn’t find conclusive evidence” for doing so. And I couldn’t agree more. If they couldn’t find the evidence which confirm or deny an event, then that event is nothing more than a rumour. They didn’t say (at least in none of the three press reports I have read this morning) that they had free and full access to bank accounts, to military and police personnel, clerics and mosque preachers, the blatant temporary re-assignment of Al-Saeedi and Mohammed Khalid to Muharraq’s provinces to preach hate against the Wa’ad candidates, the poisonous SMS messages and the “inability” of the authorities of tracing their senders or any of the other factors which should have been considered and enacted.
They just did not get any conclusive evidence.
Okay, I’ll believe them and they did their work… but in doing so and in the absence of the above information, their combined reputation will definitely be somewhat lessened in view of this report.
They did come up with some good recommendations which if enacted would truly elevate the whole democratic experiment in Bahrain:
- The National Assembly should be the only party involved in the coding the Elections Law and should be the only one to oversee everything concerned with it too.
- Creation of an independent committee to exclusively manage the elections.
- Creation of a committee which includes political societies members, judges, statisticians and demographic experts to be charged with delineating the electoral districts
- The Election Law should be the only mechanism for creating and the frequency of change the electoral districts without any political pressure
- The acceptance of any citizen to stand in any district for election without having to be living in that district
- The electoral roll should contain full voter information including name, address, CPR numbers and vocations
- Cancellation of the General Voting Centres to increase the public’s trust in the voting operation
- The complete retooling of voting for the elderly and infirm and providing proper monitors at the time of their voting (there were a lot of complaints that illiterate voters were duped)
- Limit the amount of electioneering spending by force of law
- Allow international monitors to monitor elections to increase the legitimacy of the operation nationally and internationally
- The Ministry of Justice and the Endowment directorates should completely monitor places of worship and ban their use in electioneering
- Allow candidates to assign more than one agent, but only allow a single representative (agent) within the voting venue at a time
Comments
What did you think Mahmood of the suggestion for issuing identity cards for the voters? Isn’t that a bit like the idea of the smart card that was discarded after much objection?
Also, I don’t particularly agree with the part about allowing candidates to run in constituencies other than their own. We might as well confiscate constituencies and have every man vote for himself from the entire pool. There has to be some form of regulation device to keep it all intact else the Transparency Society won’t be able to find flaws in their coming reports.
An independent committee; Who is to hand out the roles? and what is their term, and what are they to be paid, and who is to say they are neutral…. Alot of questions arise with this specific suggestion.
I like the suggestion for specifying a dollar ceiling for campaigning, but that has to be worked out properly cause some people benefitted from working under the umbrella of societies and others ran independently, so the mechanism for spending resources has to be properly studied also by the independent committee.
Where was the suggestion of issuing identity cards? I didn’t see that one. In any case, I don’t think there is a need for that as the passports are more than enough, and it is the legal identification method that was used in the past two elections, why are they even thinking of another one is beyond me.
I also think that as Bahrain is smaller than a small electoral district in India for instance, I really don’t see any need for these constituencies, running the elections under a single constituency will help alleviate a lot of the problems we were (are) having like sectarian voting, area voting, MPs thinking that they are municipal candidates rather than representing the whole nation, and it will be one-person-one-vote which is much more representative than when is currently have.
And the whole operation should be more transparent and allow international monitors to be involved so the election process gains international and national legitimacy.
I couldn’t agree with you more! It’s probably one of the foremost points raised to help push the Kingdom into a more non-secetarian and more democratic country.
Similar to how it was done in the UAE perhaps? And ‘Nabeeha 5amsa’ in Kuwait.
I really do hope the points raised are not forgotten between now and the next elections though…
As for the suggested voting ID’s, here’s AlAyam’s link
http://www.alayam.com/ArticleDetail.asp?CategoryId=17&ArticleId=232147