At the official launch of his independent parliamentary campaign for Dominica’s Mahaut Constituency, Gregor Nassief addressed a packed press gathering at his Mahaut-based campaign headquarters on Friday, laying out three critical, unaddressed flaws in the island nation’s electoral system that he says threaten to erode core democratic rights before the next general polls. Nassief opened his remarks by expressing deep alarm over the ongoing suspension of voter transfers during the recently concluded 12-month national voter confirmation exercise, a policy he described as a deliberate barrier to fair representation. He explained that thousands of Dominican citizens who had relocated across parish lines in the past two years were explicitly told by Electoral Office staff that they could submit transfer applications only after the confirmation period wrapped up – only to later be informed that no submitted transfers would take legal effect until September 2027. This gap, Nassief emphasized, disenfranchises roughly a share of mobile voters for nearly two full years, leaving them represented by a parliamentary candidate for a constituency they no longer reside in, a violation of the foundational principle that elected officials should be accountable to the communities their constituents currently call home. He highlighted a high-profile example of this discrepancy: Electoral Commission Chairman Duncan Stowe, who resides full-time in the Roseau South constituency but remains formally registered to vote in Mahaut, a mismatch that the existing transfer rules were originally designed to resolve. Rejecting official government framing of the current rules as “electoral modernization,” Nassief called on the Electoral Commission to immediately implement a temporary 30, 60, or 90-day amnesty window to allow all displaced voters to regularize their registration status before polling day. The second point of Nassief’s reform agenda targets gaps in new voter registration processing: he noted that under current legislation, an eligible citizen who submits a complete new voter registration application and receives an official receipt just 24 hours before an election writ is formally issued can still be barred from casting a ballot, as administrative delays often leave their application unprocessed in time for the final roll, even though the law mandates a 10-day window to compile a supplementary voter list after a writ is published. Nassief argued that electoral administrators have more than enough time to process all pre-writ registration submissions during that 10-day period, and that administrative backlogs should never be allowed to strip eligible first-time voters or previously unregistered citizens of their right to participate. His third core demand calls for the full consolidation of the country’s overlapping, fragmented electoral lists – including separate rosters for base registration, supplementary entries, and transfer approvals – a patchwork system he says creates unnecessary administrative confusion, increases the risk of human error during vote tabulation, and undermines public trust in the integrity of election results. Nassief noted that the Electoral Commission has already consulted the Attorney General’s office on draft legislative amendments to create a single unified electoral roll, and he urged the body to fast-track those changes rather than delaying them to a post-election timeline. Closing his address, the Mahaut independent hopeful stressed that all three proposed adjustments are low-cost, administratively feasible, and non-partisan, and that implementing them ahead of the next general election will go a long way to restoring widespread public confidence in Dominica’s electoral process, ensuring no eligible voter is unfairly sidelined from choosing the representatives that govern their daily lives.
Nassief cites voter transfer suspension among other electoral issues; ‘…democratic right…has effectively been suspended’
