Election spending limited to $40k for all

(CNS): Amendments to the Elections Law passed in the Legislative Assembly Monday saw the government benches accept a suggested change from the independent member for East End on campaign financing. The new law paves the way for every candidate to be allowed to spend $40,000 each, regardless of whether or not they are members of a political party. With the increase in seats as a result of the move to ‘one man, one vote’ in single member constituencies, political parties running candidates in every constituency could now spend over three-quarters of a million dollars on the 2017 campaign.

During the committee stages of the bill government also removed the proposed amendments to the law that would have given the elections supervisor the power to force a group or team that appears to be running on the same platform to register as a political party. Government had accepted this was a step too far, but the motivating factor had been the issue of campaign finance because previously candidates running on their own independent tickets were allowed to spend slightly more per head than candidates running on a party platform.

The draft legislation had proposed that the spending per candidate to be capped at $36,000 for party members and at $42,000 for independents. But the government benches accepted without quibble an amendment by Arden McLean to change that to a flat $40,000 limit, regardless of whether or not the candidates on a party ticket.

The levelling of financing across the political campaign field eliminated the need for the supervisor to designate a party for the purposes of election spending. But, despite pressure from the opposition benches, the election supervisor’s right to remove or not register a political party if it cannot be defined as such remains in the bill.

While McLean had argued that political parties have nothing to do with the election legislation, Premier Alden McLaughlin put the case that the supervisor has to have some way of defining and identifying a political party to ensure that entities that he described as “shell parties” could not find their way onto the register of political parties. He said that this amendment was based on recommendations from the Elections Office and was not motivated by government wanting to control the shape and form of political parties.

McLaughlin said the supervisor had to have a method of looking at political parties and determining if they should or should not be registered as such. He said an “honest political system has to be subject to scrutiny” and that scrutiny should come from the Elections Office, which should be allowed to ask for some form of evidence to illustrate that a group can be classified as a political party. The premier said that party politics should not be used as an instrument of special interest of other entities masquerading as a political group.

The debate over the merits of party politics versus independent candidates rolls on, with the premier being a flag bearer for party politics, as he has stated it is a more honest form of politics and eliminates horse-trading the morning after the poll. During the debate on the bill that sets in law the changes to Cayman’s electoral landscape to OMOV in single member constituencies, McLaughlin said that the voters have a right to know before polling day who is likely to lead a new government, who will sit in the Cabinet and the agreed platform of a potential government.

“If anyone seriously believes you can govern country like the Cayman Islands based on the disparate view of independents who have not sat down and worked out between them a common position on critical policies to make a country work, they are dreaming,” he said.

McLaughlin claimed that the success of his government was largely due to the fact that well in advance of the last election, “in many gruelling sessions”, the PPM “hammered out the issues” they all supported. The premier said politicians and candidates did a disservice to people by telling them on the campaign trail that they would introduce a certain policy when they cannot deliver.

“You can only do it if you have the support of the majority of the House,” he added and pointed out that the time to decide policy and who agrees with whom on what policy is not the morning after an election but well in advance so the country knows what it is voting for,

McLaughlin said that during the time he has spent in politics he had learned that the country is still much more likely to vote for groups of people even with the electoral reform. He said he was not suggesting that independents won’t get elected but that they were unlikely to determine the course of the next administration.