Voters turned away

PHILIPSBURG – At 10 a.m. on Monday morning stmaartennews.com received the first report about irregularities during the elections. Attorney Jojanneke Deelstra reported that she was turned away at the polling station in Middle Region at the Sr. Marie Laurence School.

“Although they have a list of eligible voters and the voting ballots are handed out there, the lady told me that it is taking too much time to retrieve my name from the list,” Deelstra wrote in an email to the chairman of the Central Voting Bureau, Jason Rogers. “So they searched half the list, which took five to ten minutes and then gave up and refused to search any further since I was holding up the line.”

Deelstra was told to come back at the end of the day when the search for her name would continue. The attorney wrote that a lady who was before her was also turned away.

“Please not that this practice makes the election invalid,” Deelstra noted in her email.

She suggested that polling stations be provided with an alphabetical list of voters to make the search for names simpler.