July 27, 2020
PEP Leader: “Postpone The General Election”
Leader of the Progressive Empowerment Party, Phillip Alexander is calling on Prime Minister, Dr. Keith Rowley, to postpone the election date, “until Covid-19 is under control and International Observers able to attend.”
See his media release below:
There are enough reasons to postpone this election and we in the Progressive Empowerment Party suggest that we as a nation should be having the discussion.
Chief among those being the fact that we are at the start of what is looking like a wave of community spread Covid19 infection, and this alone may hamper movement and persons’ interest in being part of any process that can put them and their loved ones at so much risk of contagion.
Instead of putting people in each other’s faces for campaigning and voting, we should in fact be returning to a lockdown position to halt this spread before it becomes a crisis.
Then there’s the fact that the very much needed International Observers cannot make it in time, and again we as a nation have to answer if we are comfortable having this election unsupervised, especially when one takes into account the propensity of some in authority to bend if not outright break the rules to their advantage.
Postpone the elections for three months or until Covid19 is under control and International Observers able to attend.
The Elections & Boundaries Commission has the capacity to either hold or refund deposits, stand down the elections for three months and allow for the management of both of these issues.
This also provides the opportunity to begin the process of repatriation and quarantining of the citizens trapped outside who should have been accommodated before any election was called.
Properly done, the country would be in a much better position to hold not only free and fair, but democratic elections that respects the rights of ALL citizens and not just those fortunate enough to benefit from the Minister of National Security’s exemption lottery.
It would also give the government time to read it’s final budget, the most appropriate report card on an outgoing government and the best yardstick from which to gauge their performance.
We owe it to ourselves to not only do this right but to protect all our citizens and respect the rights of those trapped outside.
All of this is reason enough to do the grown up thing here, and we put into the public record that the Progressive Empowerment Party is willing to support the right thing, and that there is adequate time in which to do it.