In the wake of the closely watched September 7, 2026 Roseau North by-election, Dominica’s Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit has launched sharp criticism of the main opposition United Workers Party (UWP), accusing the group of sowing confusion among its own supporters over the national voter confirmation process and creating internal leadership disarray. Speaking at an official government press briefing held Wednesday at the Financial Centre conference room, Skerrit argued that the UWP’s inconsistent stance on the national voter confirmation exercise directly suppressed turnout among the party’s backers, a factor he links directly to the opposition’s poor performance at the polls.
According to the prime minister, UWP leadership spent more than a year publicly urging their supporters to boycott the Electoral Office’s mandatory voter registration confirmation process. That position, he noted, was only reversed roughly 10 months before the by-election was scheduled to take place. Skerrit emphasized that the last-minute policy shift came far too late to undo the entrenched attitudes the party itself had spent months cultivating among its base.
“Dr. Thomson Fontaine consistently saying we should not go and confirm. Now you want to tell we go and confirm. Not even to beg people to confirm. But in psychology, there’s a term called conditioning. We have conditioned people’s minds not to confirm. So to uncondition, it is going to take more than 10 months,” Skerrit told reporters during the briefing.
Expanding on his point, the prime minister explained that cognitive conditioning makes reversing deeply ingrained behaviors and beliefs a slow, challenging process. Voters who had been consistently told over a long period to avoid confirming their registration, he argued, were far more likely to stick to their original stance than to abruptly adopt the party’s new, last-minute directive.
Skerrit went on to frame the UWP’s missteps on the voter confirmation issue as more than just an internal party problem, calling the opposition’s actions a “huge national disservice” that carried consequences extending beyond UWP’s own political ranks. The prime minister’s public comments came after official by-election results showed a clear victory for the ruling Dominica Labour Party: the party’s candidate Ashma McDougall secured 1,473 votes, while UWP’s Daniel Lugay trailed behind with just 998 votes.