(Jamaica Observer) Montego Bay, St James — Mark Golding on Sunday explained that the People’s National Party (PNP) has embarked on a new process to select candidates that will give it the “strongest team” going into the next general election.
The process, the PNP president said, involves a poll that serves as a preliminary screening of contenders for seats that are being contested internally.
“It’s really a kind of preliminary sifting process to take out potential candidates who really can’t move the needle and wouldn’t be able to win the seat for us. If there’s only one candidate, they still have to get more than 50 per cent support from the delegates to go forward in what we call a yes/no vote,” Golding told journalists at a news conference following the party’s National Executive Council (NEC) meeting at Montego Bay Community College.
He noted that traditionally the selection process was one in which the party’s delegates and group members in constituencies were the ones who chose the candidate. But now the party has decided to move to a one member, one vote system “and that involves a process of re-verification of our membership and so on”.
