Gail Alexan­der

An up­dat­ed pre­lim­i­nary UNC mem­ber­ship list will be pre­pared by De­cem­ber 24 and con­stituen­cies will have un­til Jan­u­ary 6 to lodge ob­jec­tions, Kelvin Ram­nath, chair­man of the par­ty's mem­ber­ship com­mit­tee said yes­ter­day.

Par­ty or­gan­is­er Ram­nath re­turned to Par­lia­ment last Fri­day–and was at the cen­tre of UNC's prepa­ra­tions for its Jan­u­ary elec­tion–from a three month ab­sence deal­ing with a health is­sue as­so­ci­at­ed with a leg in­jury. Ram­nath said that as UNC par­ty or­gan­is­er, the job falls to his team to of­fer guid­ance on mem­ber­ship ap­pli­ca­tions re­gard­ing the Jan­u­ary 24, 2010, par­ty elec­tion. He made it clear he was not in­volved 'hands-on' with the prepa­ra­tion of UNC's elec­toral list but was in­ves­ti­gat­ing all com­plaints. The Cou­va South MP said, "I'm in charge of the com­mit­tee that re­views ap­pli­ca­tions and not a sin­gle ap­pli­ca­tion has been re­ject­ed. Where there are queries we've told peo­ple to go back and check the sit­u­a­tion." He said, "It's a dif­fi­cult job es­pe­cial­ly when peo­ple try at the last minute to get their names on the list and some are sup­port­ed by var­i­ous can­di­dates and MPs. But we're fol­low­ing the EBC's pro­ce­dures." Ram­nath said the on­ly in­ci­dent so far in­volved a woman who got an­gry on Mon­day and al­leged­ly "mis­be­haved" while she was seek­ing 25 forms.

Ram­nath said, "For ac­cu­ra­cy of records, forms are sent to con­stituen­cy of­fices and per­sons should ac­cess them there. In ad­di­tion peo­ple may go to Rien­zi Com­plex and fill in forms. Forms are now al­so avail­able at my of­fice at Cou­va South." He said UNC's of­fi­cial mem­ber­ship list now stands at 34,500. How­ev­er he ex­pects this will in­crease since ap­prox­i­mate­ly 5,000 mem­ber­ship ap­pli­ca­tion forms have so far been re­ceived.

"It was ini­tial­ly slow, but has picked up re­cent­ly," he said, adding that mem­ber­ships for 2006, 2007 and 2008 were cur­rent­ly be­ing put on the sys­tem. He ad­vised that the com­plet­ed pre­lim­i­nary list will be giv­en to all con­stituen­cies on Jan­u­ary 2. Ob­jec­tions/cor­rec­tions can be filed be­tween Jan­u­ary 3 and 6. These should all be re­turned to Ram­nath's mem­ber­ship team by Jan­u­ary 7.

The team will com­plete con­sid­er­a­tion of ob­jec­tions/cor­rec­tions by Jan­u­ary 11–UNC's Nom­i­na­tion Day, Ram­nath added. Ram­nath dis­missed Ch­agua­nas MP Jack Warn­er's claim that the list ac­count­ed for 130,000 mem­bers. He said the cur­rent list is based on UNC's 1995 mem­ber­ship and can­di­dates were all aware of this and sub­scribed to that de­ci­sion. Mean­while, elec­tion com­mit­tee chair­man Kem­chan Ram­dath said yes­ter­day that the team had cir­cu­lat­ed a man­u­al and rules for the forth­com­ing elec­tion to all MPs, team co-or­di­na­tors and oth­er par­tic­i­pants. He said mem­ber­ship forms have been pre­pared for nom­i­na­tions to be sub­mit­ted on Nom­i­na­tion Day–Jan­u­ary 11 and that Elec­tion Day ma­chin­ery is be­ing pre­pared.