One-third of Marshalls parliament expected to change

BY GIFF JOHNSON
Marshall Islands Correspondent

MAJURO, Marshall Islands — In the convoluted election process of the Marshall Islands, it often takes three weeks to get a final voting result. 

The increasingly large offshore population, which votes by postal absentee ballots, is both the wildcard and the delay due to an anachronistic law from the early 1980s that allows postal ballots to arrive up to 14 days after the Nov. 20 election day, provided they are properly postmarked prior to the election — which means that while a domestic result is completed before the end of November, the law requires waiting until Dec. 5 to begin tabulating the several thousand anticipated postal votes.

By all accounts, election day proceeded nearly flawlessly, the 12th time in the 44 years of constitutional government the Marshall Islands has held a national vote.

The Marshall Islands domestic election result shows at least one-third of the 33-seat parliament are likely to change when the body is sworn in during early January. 

Five incumbents lost on the domestic vote, while six incumbents stepped down creating open seats for newcomers. Those 11 could become 13: Ebon’s six-term incumbent, John Silk, was behind by 12 to challenger Marie Milne and incumbent Tony Aiseia was ahead by just two votes over challenger Ace Doulatram, based on unofficial counts released Nov. 29 by the Electoral Administration. 

A total of 3,752 ballots were mailed to Marshallese voters, mostly in the U.S. mainland, by the Marshall Islands Electoral Administration. But more than 1,600 of these were mailed less than a week before the Nov. 20 election, reducing the chance that they arrived in time for voters to send their votes back before the deadline. Still, the potential impact of more than 3,000 postal absentee votes in electoral districts that are usually won by as few as single digits to 30 or 40 votes cannot be discounted.

If it is 11 to 13 new faces once the Nitijela convenes in January, it will park the 2023 election between 2019 and 2015 when 11 and 14 seats changed hands, respectively.

Based on the still unofficial domestic results provided earlier the week of Nov. 27 by the Electoral Administration, both Speaker Kenneth Kedi and Vice Speaker Peterson Jibas have lost. In addition, the two incumbents from Jaluit — which includes two-term incumbent and current Finance Minister and former Foreign Minister Casten Nemra — and two-term incumbent Atbi Riklon of Ujae have lost their seats, based on unofficial domestic results. 

Former Marshall Islands Ambassador to the United States Gerald Zackios is in a battle for the second seat at Arno Atoll, which he previously represented in parliament, against newcomer Stevenson Kotton, a vice president at the College of the Marshall Islands. Zackios was ahead by the reasonably solid margin of 38 votes.  The postal ballots could determine this race.

One of the most significant elections was the Kili/Bikini/Ejit race that has hinged on incumbent Mayor Anderson Jibas and his brother, Vice Speaker Jibas, heading an administration that wiped out a more than $70 million U.S.-provided trust fund that has sustained the Bikinians since the early 1980s with regular funding for food, power plant fuel, salaries, scholarships and other needs. 

Those payments dried up at the beginning of this year when the trust fund money ran out, and in August the national government placed the KBE Local Government into receivership due to the problems caused by the demise of the
trust fund.

Nitijela challenger Jess Gasper Jr., who lives in the U.S. mainland but has campaigned in the past year for the Bikini seat, was ahead by 29 votes against the vice speaker in the domestic vote by 291-262 votes. The margin of victory by challenger Tommy Jibok over incumbent Mayor Anderson Jibas is more significant, wth 350-262 votes.

Four-term incumbent Speaker Kedi has been an outspoken advocate for nuclear justice for his fallout-exposed constituency and was heavily involved in the negotiations with the U.S. on the recently signed Compact of Free Association. But he was toppled on the domestic vote by a wide margin of 274-213 by Hilton Kendall, who ran unsuccessfully against Kedi in the 2019 election.

Former President Hilda C. Heine won the domestic vote easily on her home atoll.

Chief Electoral Officer Ben Kiluwe said Nov. 24 that by law, Dec. 4 is the last day that postal ballots can be received. After mail is sorted from the two flights from the U.S. on that date, the ballots will join hundreds of others that have been filtering into the post office for several weeks on every in-bound flight. 

Tabulation is expected to begin Dec. 5 and take several days, due to the tedious nature of checking affidavits of offshore voters prior to putting their ballots into atoll ballot boxes for tabulation. mbj