BY the end of the week there will be between four and 25 new Deputies eagerly waiting to take up their seats in the States.

Wednesday’s election brings to a close a set of Deputies’ elections that has seen more candidates than ever before and, arguably, a wider choice than Islanders have ever had. It has also seen the first recent investigations into alleged electoral fraud – or more specifically, abuse of the postal voting system.

The police and the Attorney General have been drafted in to review one allegation of fraudulent use of postal votes, and a separate investigation has been commissioned after staff at the Judicial Greffe became concerned about ‘irregularities’ in the forms coming back from a St Helier district.

Here’s the problem – the election is on Wednesday. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, that anyone can do about vote-rigging, even if it’s proven later on. We might even end up in a situation where a candidate gets in, and then gets convicted of breaking the Public Elections Law. But they’re in for three years, at around about £44,000 per year anyway.

Any postal and pre-poll voting – as experience in the UK shows – is open to abuse. If abuse by one or more candidates is proven, then a very serious rethink is required about how we balance the risk of abuse against the reward of getting more votes counted on the night.

And that sounds like a job for the new Privileges and Procedures Committee – if only so that it keeps them away from the vacuum of time, energy and money of the composition reform debate.

On the subject of the States and their pay – there was a teasing little line in the report by the States Remuneration Committee in their report last week about ‘a discussion document setting out relevant issues relating to pay for elected Members’ to be published next year.

I’ve already made £110 betting on the elections – and I’m pretty confident of another £100 after placing another bet with a colleague who’s far better with a camera than I am with a keyboard – but I’d stick a fair bit on yet another crack at the old should-ministers-get-more-loot chestnut.

Let me save everyone a bit of time. No. No, they shouldn’t. They really shouldn’t. I can think of at least one Scrutiny member who works harder than at least one minister – and that’s pretty much the end of the argument right there.
But if you want more, try this – singling out one type of Member for extra pay would be incredibly divisive, and we’ve got quite enough of that already. And allotting that extra pay based on decisions made by the States, not the voting public, is completely undemocratic.

Is terminal stupidity a prerequisite for being a minister in Guernsey?

Is there a rule somewhere – a sort of ‘small-print’ message that says you can’t run a States department in Guernsey without having had a lobotomy? And just how stupid, ignorant and backwards do you have to be to make a racist joke in a press conference?

I can’t answer these questions, and neither can you. The only person who can is Guernsey’s Deputy Chief Minister, Bernard Floquet, who ‘joked’ on Thursday that the US was going to let Britain ‘put golliwogs back on jam jars’ in what he clearly thought was a hilarious off-the-cuff remark about US-president elect Barack Obama.

Instead, he came out of it looking and sounding like the kind of embarrassing cousin who Silvio Berlusconi might try and avoid at family get-togethers. And please note that’s not political correctness talking. That’s the sound of 2008 ringing in your ears.

Guernsey’s ministers, you might remember, have a bit of a track-record for this kind of thing. Their chief minister, no less, was reported earlier this year to have remarked to a colleague ‘Show me some [expletive deleted] respect’, before following-up with ‘I’ll punch your [expletive deleted] teeth out’.

I don’t think that I’m being hopelessly optimistic when I say that had one of our ministers lost his mind quite so spectacularly, they’d be out of a job in days. Whatever else people might say about Frank Walker, I doubt very much that he’d stand for that.

Following news from the north, here’s some news from the west. Again, it’s Obama in the spotlight, kind of. The BBC reported that he would have to give up his apparently epic e-mail habit because of US Freedom of Information laws that require presidential e-mails – all presidential e-mails – to be published.

That’s the kind of legislation we need, to be applied retrospectively, of course. Imagine the fun we could have with access to every e-mail that Senator Walker has sent in the last three years. What does it say about us that the US has more stringent and effective transparency regulations than we do?