KAY-MARIE FLETCH­ER

Se­nior Re­porter

kay-marie.fletch­er@guardian.co.tt

The Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment Elec­tions (LGE) at­tract­ed many first-time vot­ers in East Trinidad yes­ter­day.

From as ear­ly as 5.15 am, young peo­ple turned up at polling sta­tions across all sev­en elec­toral dis­tricts in the Bor­ough Cor­po­ra­tion of Ari­ma.

Speak­ing to Guardian Me­dia out­side the Ari­ma New Gov­ern­ment Pri­ma­ry School, one first-time vot­er, 20-year-old Dasani Quam­i­na, said he was ex­cit­ed about dip­ping his fin­ger for the first time.

Quam­i­na said, “I’m re­al­ly ex­cit­ed. I’ve been wait­ing for this for a while. My fam­i­ly al­ways made me know how im­por­tant it is that I vote and ex­er­cise my rights as a cit­i­zen. They al­ways make sure I’m aware of the pol­i­tics that’s go­ing on, so I’m feel­ing good. I’m ready to dip my fin­ger.”

“I want to see change be­cause what I learnt from what lo­cal gov­ern­ment is and how the re­form is sup­posed to go, it’s sup­posed to help with the fix­ing of roads, the fix­ing of schools, garbage, all of that, so I want to see my com­mu­ni­ty de­vel­op,” he added.

Sim­i­lar­ly, 18-year-old Kay­la La Fon, an­oth­er res­i­dent of Tumpuna Road, Ari­ma, said, “It was very in­for­ma­tive, and they had a lot of in­struc­tions, so it was very easy to fol­low along and ac­tu­al­ly be able to vote. It was fun to be able to be a part of some­thing big­ger... I would like to see some sort of change in my com­mu­ni­ty.”

But while some young peo­ple have called for change, some sea­soned vot­ers wished for the sta­tus quo to re­main.

Al­so speak­ing yes­ter­day, 88-year-old Ann Gill said she’s ac­cus­tomed to vot­ing at the lo­cal gov­ern­ment lev­el and be­lieves that the ad­min­is­tra­tion of this cor­po­ra­tion should re­main the same.

The Ari­ma Bor­ough Cor­po­ra­tion has his­tor­i­cal­ly been a PNM-strong­hold.

In the last Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment Elec­tions, the PNM se­cured six of the sev­en dis­tricts.

The Ari­ma Cen­tral elec­toral dis­trict was won by Shel­don “Fish” Gar­cia.

How­ev­er, Gar­cia left the Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress and joined the PNM this year.

Speak­ing to Guardian Me­dia im­me­di­ate­ly af­ter vot­ing, Gar­cia said he was pleased with his de­ci­sion to leave the UNC. He said he was cer­tain that his switch would re­dound to the PNM se­cur­ing all sev­en dis­tricts.

Gar­cia, along with many oth­er peo­ple, said the vot­ing process was very smooth yes­ter­day.

How­ev­er, some com­plained that one polling sta­tion on Tumpuna Road made no pro­vi­sions for peo­ple with dis­abil­i­ties to vote.

Un­able to walk, Pat­sy Chu­niesingh was left with a lot of dif­fi­cul­ty, as she said the polling sta­tion closed the front gate, not al­low­ing any­one to dri­ve in.

Ad­di­tion­al­ly, no wheel­chairs were on lo­ca­tion at the vot­ing booths.

As a re­sult, her two broth­ers, Fran­cis and Mitchell, had to phys­i­cal­ly lift her up and car­ry her to the vot­ing booth from the street to vote yes­ter­day.

Up­set about the in­con­ve­nience and em­bar­rass­ment his sis­ter faced, Fran­cis said, “She can’t walk, she had a stroke. They didn’t even have a wheel­chair for her and they closed the gate that al­lowed eas­i­er ac­cess in­side. We thought we would have been able to dri­ve in but we couldn’t, even though we told them (the po­lice) that she can­not walk. All the time, this gate used to be open but this time we had to car­ry our sis­ter our­selves.”

Guardian Me­dia ob­served po­lice ve­hi­cles near all the polling sta­tions in Ari­ma.