The Voters List vis-à-vis the population continues to be the subject of attention, local and international. Without exception, all regional and international observer missions for the 2020 General and Regional Elections urged the sanitisation of the List.
A bloated voters list has consequences, such as repeated voting, manipulation of the elections, Guyanese unable to know the true will of the people, and a large section of society entertaining doubts about the credibility of the government.
The National Recount in 2020 unearthed grave irregularities as admitted by none other than Justice Claudette Singh, Chairperson of the Guyana Election Commission (GECOM).
As Guyana gets ready to go to the Local Government Elections the Preliminary List of Electors comprises 684,354 names, the equivalent of over 91% of Guyana’s population. GECOM reported that just 17 objections have been made to entrants on the Preliminary Voters’ List a month after the exercise.
CARICOM in 2020 said “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.”
The table above represents the PPP/C votes for the last five elections, excluding 2020, as declared by GECOM.
