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The States Assembly and Constitution Committee has backed down after sustained criticism and accusations of electoral interference surrounding its plans to publish who attended training courses being put on for election candidates.
Deputy Chris Le Tissier is one of those that had objected and having failed to receive answers informally, used question time in the States to raise the issue yesterday.
He asked whether SACC would review the decision to publish the attendance records of those attending the candidates training information sessions, "bearing in mind the objections, expressed both publicly and through the States members internal emails, now that has been seen as government interference in the democratic process".
SACC President, Deputy Carl Meerveld said that candidates will have pages on the election website.
It has made the proposal to publish attendance at the courses on the website because 87% of the public responding to a survey said that attendance at information courses was important.
"However, the committee has reviewed its original decision and has agreed that it will remain the decision of each candidate as to whether they wish to include their attendance in their manifesto," he said.
He rejected the accusation that Sacc wanted to interfere in the electoral process.
"The decision to publish the information was based on the findings of the Scrutiny Management report and the fact that the States, again, is spending money putting these courses on and we thought it would be of value for the electorate to know who had taken up those courses. But as I said in my previous answer, the decision has been changed, and we will leave it to each candidate to do as they wish."
There was no formal vote on the issues when the initial decision to publish was made "as it was part of a wider discussion on electoral matters".
"However, the decision to now leave the inclusion of attendance information to the individual candidate was unanimous."
Nearly 70 people attended the first training session.
"We would encourage anybody else who's interested in knowing more about the States or potentially standing to attend and there will be plenty of space in future sessions. At the last session, the hall was divided in half because there was a judo lesson going on next door, a different type of wrestling, but in future sessions, the whole hall will be available to us."
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