Guyanese protest GECOM for clean voters list

“All we need is a clean voters list,” said Amsterdam, pointing out that “instead we are getting barricades.”

Local Government Elections, which are constitutionally due every three year, have passed the due date. GECOM is proceeding with plans to hold those elections, which Mr. Vishnu Persaud, Chief Elections Officer, had advised cannot be held before February 13, 2023. The Claims and Objection periods, which were extended, will be concluded on September 21, 2022 and September 25, 2022 respectively.

The Voters List remains the subject of national and international concern. Without exception the major political parties in Guyana, regional and international observers to the 2020 General and Regional Elections, have drawn attention to the discrepancies.

CARICOM pointed out that “As a minimum condition of electoral reform, the Team recommends the urgent need for the total re-registration of all voters in Guyana. It is clear that given the state of the voter registration of the country that Guyana was not adequately prepared for the 2020 poll. Yet circumstances beyond the control of the Commission precluded this preparedness. It therefore behooves the Commission to create a new voter registry especially given the suspicion that the 2020 register was bloated, a suspicion which is not without merit.”

In October 2015, Mr. Bharrat Jagdeo, Leader of the People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C), and then Leader of the Opposition demanded, among other things, “enhanced biometrics and a new voters’ list to be compiled on the basis of a fresh house to house enumeration.” Earlier this year, President Irfaan Ali said the List is not the problem.

Leader of the Opposition, Mr. Aubrey Norton at a rally on August 2 said, “If they [GECOM] are not prepared to give us a clean voters list, we must do everything to ensure there is no election with the dirty list.” Recently, he drew attention to the Preliminary List of Electors (PLE) that has 684,354 names, representing over 91% of Guyana’s population.

“This bloated monstrosity alone provides sufficient grounds to question whether GECOM can deliver an election that accurately reflects the democratic will of the Guyanese people and wins their trust and confidence,” stated Norton

The A Partnership for National Unity and Alliance for Change (APNU+AFC) has been calling for a clean voters list. When they were in government, they were moving to effect a new national voters list, resulting from house-to-house registration, before the 2020 General and Regional Elections. That exercise by GECOM was started and stopped on the pretext that it could not be completed in time for the Elections.

GECOM in a recent statement, addressing the issue of the List, pointed out that it “has taken note of concerns and opinions in the public domain in relation to the existing PLE which was extracted from the National Register of Registrants Database (NRRDB) [but] it was determined that GECOM cannot act contrary to the legal provisions enacted in the National Registration Act (NRA), Chapter 19:08.”

But Shadow Minister of Legal Affairs, Mr. Roysdale Forde S.C, does not believe GECOM has done all it is required to do by simply saying that names cannot be taken off the list. According to him, GECOM has “to come up with a mechanism to ensure in respect of persons who cannot be taken off the list, that they put in place sufficient mechanisms to ensure or reduce the risk of multiple and substitution voting. It is their constitutional duty to that.”