PHILIPSBURG--Prime Minister William Marlin said his Cabinet took the decision to place election for the Third Parliament of the country on September 26, 2016, a Monday, instead of a Friday, in a move to ensure everyone have ample opportunity to cast their ballot.

 

Marlin said in the Council of Ministers Press Briefing on Wednesday, “By holding elections on a Friday a large number of the community [such as – Ed.] the Seventh Day Adventist community is not given the opportunity to fully participate in the electoral process.”

 

Candidates in the past, who were Seventh Day Adventists, were active during the election campaign, but on election day “they disappear so to speak” due to their religious obligations, Marlin said. Putting the elections on a Monday, “we accommodate those people,” he said.

 

Nomination Day on which political parties have to submit their slate of candidates is set as August 8, 2016, also a Monday. The slates of parties that do not already have a set in the current Second Parliament will have to get their slates endorsed by at least one per cent of the voters who cast a ballot in the 2014 Parliamentary Elections.

 

The new Parliament will be sworn in on Monday, October 31, 2016. Marlin said some in the community are referring to that new Parliament as the “Halloween Parliament,” because the 15 new/re-elected Members of Parliament will be sworn in on Halloween, an event celebrated in the United States, but which has been adopted locally.

 

“On St. Maarten we have a tendency to follow everybody’s holidays and our own sometimes go by with not much notice,” said Marlin about the Halloween reference.

 

The September 26, 2016, polls are a snap election that will bring to a premature end the current parliamentary term. This current term should have ended in the latter part of 2018. However, after a political impasse between Coalition of Eight in Parliament and the then Marcel Gumbs Cabinet following a motion of no confidence against that Cabinet, a National Decree to dissolve Parliament and call snap elections on February 9, 2016, was signed by Governor Eugene Holiday on October 29.

 

That Decree, though published in the National Gazette (“Landscourant”) after it was signed, was only to come into effect on December 15, 2015. Before the Decree could come into effect, the current William Marlin Cabinet submitted an amendment to the Governor changing the date for the snap election from February 9, 2016, to September 26, 2016.

 

Reform

 

The date change was made to allow for electoral and constitutional reform as is championed by the Coalition of Eight. That process will be led by a three-person “committee of experts” who will be named by the Cabinet in the coming days. All three persons will be from the local community and should be in place within two weeks. The Cabinet has committed to put the committee in place within two weeks of the signing of the amended decree by the Governor.

 

Marlin said he had some proposals for electoral reform to share with the Coalition of Eight, the Council of Ministers and the reform committee. “I think the proposal that I have as far as stopping ship-jumping is a good one and it will basically eliminate the phenomenon of ship-jumpers immediately. At least it will take away the effect of ship jumping,” he said.

 

Asked by the press to give more details of his proposal to eliminate ship jumping, Marlin said, “If I wanted to do that, I would have done so in my opening statement [of the press briefing – Ed.].”

 

Ship-jumping refers to MPs opting to break with the political party they were elected with and going independent. MPs going independent and forming new coalitions with other parties have led to St. Maarten having five Councils of Ministers in the past five years. That’s a new council for every year since the country attained country-within-the-Dutch-Kingdom status five years ago on October 10, 2010.

 

Asked if the nine months available before the snap elections are sufficient to bring about electoral reform, Marlin said, “The time period will indeed be short, but electoral reform can be completed in time for the elections … I am convinced that it can be done.”

 

Constitutional reform “may take several years,” he said.

 

The Daily Herald