With campaign signs popping up daily across the island as the 2014 election season nears, the St. Croix District Board of Elections held a four-hour marathon of a meeting Wednesday setting out to tackle a lengthy agenda.
With the primary election about six months away and with new electronic voting equipment going into use, officials made it clear they still have much to do in order to make the election process go smoother than in years past.
The board nearly finalized the election season calendar, while also talking of strategies to register more voters and to demonstrate the new voting equipment at the coming Department of Agriculture fair. The board also decided to move forward in the process of hiring a new administrative assistant.
But first on the list of issues needing addressing was an update on the mold issue at the elections office that recently caused some employees to complain of mild sickness and the office to close while it was cleaned.
St. Croix Board of Elections Chairman Adelbert Bryan called an emergency meeting Jan. 22 to get board members to provide input on how to deal with the issue, but nobody else from the Elections Board showed up.
Elections System Supervisor Caroline Fawkes reported that recommendations had been made by Adcon Environmental Services, which recently completed an assessment of the building’s mold situation. Those recommendations included the building’s landlord, Sunny Isle Developers, dealing with air conditioning system duct cleanings and mold monitoring on a quarterly basis, moving forward, and for the Elections System to monitor the recently cleaned registration books and cabinet filing system, which are at the heart of the office’s ongoing mold problem.
“The employees are requesting masks and gloves, but no matter where you go you’re going to have the same books. The books are the issue,” Fawkes said. “The goal is to get rid of these books and that process will hopefully start happening after this election in December.”
The books, which contain registration data going back to 1996, are in the process of being converted to an electronic digital format and inputted into an Elections System database.
“For this election, we have to go with these books,” Fawkes said.
Three hours into the meeting as the topic shifted to the Election System’s current iteration of its “candidate information” and “qualifications for offices” worksheets, some squabbles from the past emerged, voices were raised and bickering ensued.
The St. Croix District Board in December passed a motion which would require candidates to answer a seven-question, yes/no questionnaire with the questions ranging from candidates declaring whether or not they’ve been a convicted felon or convicted of a crime of moral turpitude as defined by the Supreme Court to whether or not they’d solicited bribes, favors or payments for approval of government services or contracts.
The last questions asked about sexual crime convictions including pedophilia and unlawful sexual contact, and whether or not the candidate was up to date in filing his or her local and federal taxes.
The Joint Board of Elections voted against utilizing the questionnaire.
In a letter received by Fawkes from V.I. Attorney General Vincent Frazer dated Jan. 30 where she asked for his opinion on the questionnaire, Frazer wrote it “should not be utilized in its current form.”
Frazer added that, “The Revised Organic Act and the election code provide the exclusive test for candidates seeking to run in an election. Therefore the St. Croix district board lacks jurisdiction to superimpose new conditions for candidacy beyond those prescribed by the Revised Organic Act and the election code.”
Frazer concluded there was no local law that would prohibit a candidate for qualifying should they have answered “yes” to four of the seven questions asked. Those questions dealt with whether a candidate voted outside the territory within the last four years, whether they received an honorable discharge from the military (if they served), whether they were convicted of any sexual offense crime and had they filed all required local and federal tax forms.
According to Bryan, the current “qualifications for offices” sheet that potential candidates receive is wrong and has been for years.
“This thing is incomplete,” Bryan said. “That’s what the attorney general should have seen if he wanted to make good findings. This is why we need a questionnaire because this piece of paper they put in with the candidates sheet is not consistent with the law.”
Bryan’s tone continued raising and he eventually brought up Sen. Alicia “Chucky” Hansen’s candidacy being qualified by the board prior to the 2012 election, a decision Bryan said was wrong.
Hansen was convicted in 2009 of three counts of failure to file tax returns, but the convictions were misdemeanors and not considered to be crimes of moral turpitude, and therefore the challenge to her eligibility brought up by the V.I. Action Group was denied.
Board member Rupert Ross disagreed with Bryan’s stance.
“Member Bryan, I’m not here to argue with you. But just as you said we certified Sen. Hansen as a qualified voter and you didn’t agree with it, fine, you didn’t agree with it. But the board made a decision and the board was right,” Ross said. “I’m not going to waste my time debating you on those issues.”
The district board’s next scheduled meeting is March 5.
