The con­tro­ver­sial Con­sti­tu­tion (Amend­ment) Bill 2014 was passed in the Sen­ate last night with the sup­port of In­de­pen­dent Sen­a­tors Dhanayshar Ma­habir, Rolph Bal­go­b­in and David Small.

Af­ter al­most three days of heat­ed de­bate, the bill was passed at 11.09 pm with a to­tal of 18 sen­a­tors vot­ing for it and 12 against it. All the Op­po­si­tion Sen­a­tors present and six in­de­pen­dents vot­ed against the bill.How­ev­er, the bill re­ceived the three In­de­pen­dents' votes on­ly af­ter Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar agreed to ac­cept an amend­ment to the con­tro­ver­sial runoff clause put for­ward by Ma­habir.

Ma­habir pro­posed that a third place can­di­date in an elec­tion, who gains 25 per cent of the votes and who is with­in a mar­gin of not less than five per­cent­age points of the sec­ond place can­di­date, al­so be al­lowed to con­test the runoff elec­tion.He said this triage sys­tem will give all par­ties a fair­er chance in an elec­tion and al­low the third par­ties a chance.

Ini­tial­ly, the Gov­ern­ment had pro­posed that on­ly the top two can­di­dates would con­test the runoff if nei­ther of them gained at least 50 per cent of the votes. But many ar­gued that this would kill off third par­ties.

As it turns out, how­ev­er, in the runoff elec­tion as pro­posed by Ma­habir, the Gov­ern­ment al­so agreed to waive the 50 per cent win­ning mar­gin for the three can­di­dates. This means the win­ner of the runoff could win the seat with­out gain­ing at least 50 per cent or more of the votes. Per­sad-Bisses­sar al­so ac­cept­ed Bal­go­b­in's pro­pos­al to re­call a non-per­form­ing MP af­ter two and a half years in­stead of three.The PM al­so ac­cept­ed an amend­ment pro­posed by Small that peo­ple wish­ing to re­call MPs must get the sup­port of 20 per cent of the vot­ers in a con­stituen­cy to ap­ply for a pe­ti­tion. The orig­i­nal clause had a 10 per cent thresh­old.

Small, sup­port­ed by his col­leagues, said this would avoid mis­chief.There was heat­ed de­bate on the con­tro­ver­sial bill dur­ing the com­mit­tee stage, af­ter all the re­main­ing Sen­a­tors had ear­li­er made their con­tri­bu­tions.Dur­ing dis­cus­sions in the com­mit­tee stage, PNM sen­a­tors main­tained a non-sup­port­ive stance, ex­press­ing their com­plete re­jec­tion of the bill be­cause of the fact that there was no con­sul­ta­tion on the runoff as­pect. Dur­ing the re­call amend­ment dis­cus­sion, PNM Sen­a­tor Faris Al-Rawi want­ed to know where the 20 per cent fig­ure came from and what did the con­sul­ta­tions say about it.Small replied that he didn't just pluck the 20 per cent out of the air. He said af­ter dis­cus­sions with an in­ter­na­tion­al re­call ex­pert, he con­clud­ed that 20 per cent, which could mean 5,000 or 6,000 vot­ers in T&T, was rea­son­able.