Elec­tions and Bound­aries Com­mis­sion (EBC) Chief Elec­tion Of­fi­cer Fern Nar­cis-Scope said yes­ter­day that the vot­er turnout for the To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly elec­tion ap­peared to have been much high­er than the turnout in Jan­u­ary.

Speak­ing to Guardian Me­dia around noon yes­ter­day, Nar­cis-Scope said she wit­nessed the open­ing of the polls at the Bon Ac­cord Gov­ern­ment Pri­ma­ry School.

“That went well and cer­tain­ly while I was there, I saw a num­ber of the elec­torate com­ing in to ex­er­cise their fran­chise. I have vis­it­ed quite a few polling sta­tions this morn­ing, high elec­tor turnout from the num­bers and we ex­pect things to con­tin­ue to run smooth­ly through­out the day,” Nar­cis-Scope said.

She said there were no re­ports of any ir­reg­u­lar­i­ties at any of the polling sta­tions.

Nar­cis-Scope said the vot­er turnout seemed to be high­er than dur­ing the Jan­u­ary 25 elec­tion, which end­ed in a 6-6 dead­lock.

“I per­son­al­ly am of that view cer­tain­ly, the pol­i­tics from Jan­u­ary till now, things have in­ten­si­fied. The cam­paign from the ma­jor par­ties and I ex­pect that in turn will re­sult in a high­er turnout and from when I li­aised with the re­turn­ing of­fi­cers, we saw in some cas­es 18-20 per cent of the elec­torate out by 10 am, which is a lit­tle un­usu­al.”

The Chief Elec­tion Of­fi­cer said all COVID-19 pro­to­cols were en­forced at polling sta­tions. How­ev­er, Nar­cis-Scope said the pan­dem­ic pre­sent­ed the EBC with oth­er chal­lenges.

“We have strug­gled to have the ad­e­quate num­bers of staff. I un­der­stand up to last night (Sun­day), there were per­sons who got phone calls from health in­form­ing them that they were COVID-pos­i­tive and of course could not work in our polling sta­tions.”

But she said ad­di­tion­al staff was trained to fill those gaps so the process could con­tin­ue un­in­ter­rupt­ed.

Mean­while, Nar­cis-Scope said the EBC will soon ap­proach the Gov­ern­ment with rec­om­men­da­tions to treat with cam­paign­ing on so­cial me­dia on Elec­tion Day.

She said no re­ports of such cam­paign­ing were re­ceived by the EBC yes­ter­day but the leg­is­la­tion gov­ern­ing such cam­paign­ing needs to be up­dat­ed.

When she spoke with Guardian Me­dia yes­ter­day, she an­tic­i­pat­ed re­sults from the polls would have been ready be­tween 9 pm and 10 pm. Re­fer­ring to the elec­tron­ic elec­tion man­age­ment pro­gramme the EBC pro­posed to use in two dis­tricts, but which was scrapped on Sun­day af­ter a protest by the PDP and UNC, Nar­cis-Scope said re­sults may have come in a bit ear­li­er.

“Had I been able to do that pi­lot project in those two dis­tricts, I would have been able to give you that very ear­ly. It is un­for­tu­nate but in the spir­it of co­op­er­a­tion, we de­cid­ed to pull that back and we do hope we can roll that out for the up­com­ing lo­cal gov­ern­ment elec­tions at the end of next year,” she said.