JAMAICA | The Numbers Don't Lie: The mystery race between Paul Buchanan and Andrew Holness

A Statistical Investigation into the 2025 Election in West Central St. Andrew

KINGSTON, Jamaica September 17, 2025 - Andrew Holness was on Tuesday September 16, sworn in for the fourth time as prime minister of Jamaica. This, despite the election night ‘bru-ha-ha’, that cast an ominous shadow over arguably, the most important constituency race of the 2025 Jamaican elections.

The morning after the 2025 election, something felt off in West Central St. Andrew. Not the usual post-election vibes - whether you winning or losing - but something deeper that made your stomach turn.

An election is a numbers game, and the numbers coming back from places that had been solid PNP ground for nearly twenty years just didn't add up. It was like waking up and finding out gravity stopped working.

Take St. Mary's Church - that's a place where PNP used to lock off 9 out of every 10 votes, easy as Sunday morning. Suddenly, it swings the other way? Balcombe Drive, Drews Avenue, all those communities where you'd see orange bandanas flying proud and hear "Blood and Fire Comrades" blasting from every corner shop... the results looked like somebody just pressed delete on two decades of history.

But ‘politics don't work so’. People don't just wake up one morning and decide to throw away their whole political identity. So what really went down?

To figure out what went wrong in 2025, we had to go back and look at what normal used to look like. Like any good detective story, you need to know what the scene is supposed to look like before you can spot what’s out of place.

From 2007 to 2016, West Central St. Andrew was steady like the sunrise. Election after election, same communities voted the same way, give or take a little wiggle room. The PNP strongholds stayed strong like Blue Mountain coffee, the competitive places stayed competitive, and turnout was regular as clockwork - around half the people showing up, more or less the same everywhere.

This is how democracy supposed to behave. People's political loyalty builds up over time - from their community, their experience, stories dem grandmother tell them. It don't just evaporate like morning mist.

But 2025? All that steady, predictable pattern just mash up like a dropped phone screen.

Now here's where the story gets really interesting. When scientists want to prove something didn't happen by pure accident, they use something called correlation analysis. Think of it like mathematical detective work - they are looking for patterns that’s too perfect, too precise to be random.

Picture fingerprints at a crime scene. If you find the same fingerprint on the door, the safe, and the getaway car, you know that's not coincidence - that's evidence. The numbers from West Central St. Andrew left mathematical fingerprints just as clear.

Two different tests, running completely separate calculations, both pointed to the same shocking discovery:

The exact same places where PNP was strongest historically became the exact same places where they lost the most votes in 2025.

The first test (called Pearson correlation) scored 0.85 out of a perfect 1.0 - meaning you could predict, with almost certainty, where PNP would lose votes just by checking where the PNP dominated historically. The second test (called Spearman correlation) scored even higher at 0.93 - basically mathematical perfection.

In election science worldwide, anything above 0.80 raises red flags. These numbers weren't just red flags - they were air raid sirens blaring in broad daylight.

Here's what made the whole thing so suspicious: everything happened completely backwards from how real political campaign supposed to work.

In normal elections, parties lose support in their weak areas first. Makes sense, right? Those voters not as committed, easier to persuade, more likely to stay home, more willing to try something new.

But 2025 was the complete opposite. PNP safest areas - places where they used to win 80-90% regular, where orange was practically the official colour - those areas collapsed first and hardest. Meanwhile, places where they were already struggling barely budge at all and in some cases in JLP areas, the PNP got more votes!

It's like a cook losing their best, most loyal customers while the people who barely ever come still showing up. That don't happen in the natural world.

Let's zoom in on one specific example that tells the whole story: Church Hall Hill Avenue.

For years, this was PNP territory, no questions asked. The kind of place where wearing green during election season might get you some serious side-eye and a lecture about community loyalty.

In all the historical data, Church Hall Hill Avenue ranked as one of the absolute top PNP strongholds. Rock solid, reliable, orange through and through.

But come 2025, it suddenly turn into one of the places where JLP made their biggest "gains."

Here's the scary part: both our mathematical tests predicted this would happen based purely on Church Hall's PNP history. The stronger PNP used to be somewhere, the more likely that place was to "flip" in 2025.

That's not how democracy works - that's how targeting works.

Here's another piece of the puzzle that doesn't make sense: The JLP didn't actually campaign their way to victory. Their vote totals barely increased from their usual performance. Instead, they "won" because PNP votes just disappeared into thin air.

It's like winning a domino game not because you play better moves, but because your opponent pieces keep vanishing from the table. The mathematical evidence shows this clear as day - JLP "success" happened in the exact same places, following the exact same pattern, as where PNP votes went missing.

Real political victories come from convincing people, getting them excited, fielding better candidates, running stronger campaigns. But the numbers show JLP didn't do any of that extra work. They just inherited votes that the PNP somehow was not able to access.

Like inheriting a house when the previous owner mysteriously can't find their keys.

In fact, much of the PNP’s money was spent in the PNP areas of the constituency in holding events and canvassing activities.

When you step back and look at the big picture, the 2025 election in West Central St. Andrew displayed every single warning sign that election experts around the world watch for when they suspect something not right:

1. Steady history shattered overnight - 15 years of predictable voting patterns just destroyed in one election cycle
2. Backwards targeting - strongest areas got hit hardest, weak areas barely touched
3. Mathematical precision - correlations too perfect for natural political change
4. Upside-down campaign effects - losses concentrated exactly where they shouldn't be
5. Artificial gains - opposition "wins" without actually gaining new supporters

Any one of these red flags might have an innocent explanation. All of them showing up together in the same election? That's not chance - that's a signature.

The mathematical evidence points strongly toward systematic voter suppression in West Central St. Andrew in 2025 - a coordinated effort to prevent PNP supporters from having their votes count, targeted with surgical precision at the party's strongest communities.

Let's be clear: this analysis can't tell us exactly how it happened or who did it. Correlation isn't causation, and numbers alone can't prove specific mechanisms. What it can tell us, with mathematical certainty, is that something artificial disrupted the natural democratic process.

But this is not about which party you support. This is about democracy itself, about every Jamaican's right to have their vote count and their voice heard. It's called one man, one vote, same vote.

When voting patterns that held steady for 15 years suddenly flip with mathematical precision, when the strongest communities mysteriously "change their mind" overnight, when correlations reach levels that make election scientists around the world raise red flags - the numbers are telling us that our democratic process got hijacked.

In West Central St. Andrew, 2025 wasn't an election in the truest sense. It was something else entirely.

And every Jamaican - whether you orange, green, or don't care about politics at all - should be deeply concerned about that.

Because if it can happen in West Central St. Andrew, if mathematical patterns this precise can target one community's political voice, then it can happen anywhere. To anyone.

The numbers don't lie. The question now is: what are we going to do about what they're telling us?

This analysis is based on statistical correlation methods recognized internationally in election forensics research. While correlation indicates pattern, it does not prove specific causation mechanisms, which would require additional investigation and evidence.

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