Approximately one thousand people who have applied for employment at the Antigua and Barbuda Electoral Commission (ABEC) to man polling stations on election day will undergo four days of intense training this week.
Assistant to the Supervisor of Elections, Ian Hughes, said the training will cover all the areas polling clerks, who work alongside Returning Officers, will be required to be competent in.
“The training will cover the entire voting process to include how to issue the ballots, the need to carefully examine the Voter ID cards to ensure the person presenting him/herself for voting is the one listed in the Voters’ Register, how to determine a spoilt ballot, among other critical issues,” he reported.
Polling clerks will also be required to ensure that voters do not take cellular phones into the voting booths or wear party colours when presenting themselves to vote.
They will also seek to ensure that voters do not undermine the system by attempting to vote multiple times. Clerks will therefore carefully examine voters’ index fingers for signs that they may have voted previously.
According to Hughes, ABEC takes its responsibility of training election workers seriously.
“We can’t take any chances as elections are serious undertakings and at all times we must be in a position to say we trained that individual based on the high standard of work displayed,” he stated.
Once the training session has been completed the one thousand applicants will be whittled down to the top seven hundred who successfully complete the test administered at the end of the course.
The training exercises will be conducted in each constituency by the seventeen Returning Officers.
The Returning Officers who will oversee the elections in each constituency, completed their training in September last year.
