Dear Editor,
GECOM, in concluding another cycle of national registration, has commenced the Claims and Objections exercise. That exercise provides for persons who are qualified to be registered, but not yet registered, to complete an application to be registered. It also provides for registrants to apply for a change of particulars and transfers (name, address, et al). Additionally, it provides for registrants to object to the inclusion of names of unqualified persons, such as the dead, in the register.
The goodly Attorney General has seized the moment to tell the world and the observer missions, in particular, that this is the mechanism for the cleansing of the list of ineligible and deceased persons, thus contending that the claims of a “bloated” list can stand public scrutiny and are baseless.
The Attorney General is the one who has the ultimate responsibility for piloting legislation that’s intended to redress the presence of ineligible names, which remain in the register and on the voters` list, even after the conduct of claims and objections. His public posture seeks to suggest that there is no need to address the contention of a “bloated” list, since mechanisms are in place to continuously sanitize the list.
In effect, what he is doing is seeking to maintain a list that`s evidently corrupted, since there are thousands of registered overseas Guyanese who have died after 2008 when the current listed was established and continuously subjected to updates, including the current cycle of registration. There is no adequate mechanism for those names to be deleted.
He is also ignoring the fact that GECOM has consciously not provided for the names of deceased persons which are not reported on by the General Registrar` Office (Births and Deaths), but reported on by the Chief Medical Officer and the Commissioner of Police, to be struck off the list.
The Attorney General is thus masking the corrupted state of the list and by his actions condoning and facilitating the retention of thousands of names of dead persons on the voters` list. The current rogue and comatose state of GECOM makes the situation even worse, since there are no efforts on its part to rectify these know deficiencies in its system, while the AG virally misleads the nation and all a sundry.
Yours truly,
Vincent Alexander
Charles Corbin
Desmond Trotman
Commissioners
