The General Secretary of the People’s Progressive Party (PPP), Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo, along with a team from the party, is scheduled to meet with the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) today. At a press conference last Thursday, Jagdeo announced that the meeting will focus on discussing GECOM’s preparations for the upcoming General and Regional Elections.
Jagdeo also dismissed claims made by the Alliance for Change (AFC) that GECOM is unprepared to conduct free, fair, and credible elections. He further rejected the idea that there is significant dysfunction within the Commission. However, despite refuting these claims, Jagdeo did not provide any evidence to counter the AFC’s concerns.
The call for biometrics in the election process has been a topic of public debate for years. Allegations of dead individuals voting, double voting, and people voting who were not even in Guyana on Election Day have been corroborated by information from the Immigration Department and the Guyana Registration Office. This data was presented to GECOM during the 2020 Recount Exercise.
Order 60/2020 Recount
Initially, GECOM suggested that the recount exercise, set out in Order 60/2020, would help achieve a “final, credible count” and ensure that the elections met the requirements outlined in the Representation of the People Act. According to the gazetted order, GECOM had the responsibility to reconcile various aspects of the election process, including:
- Ballots issued vs. ballots cast
- Destroyed, spoiled, and stamped ballots, including their counterfoils/stubs
- The authenticity of ballots and voter records
- Votes cast without ID cards
- Proxies issued and utilized
- Statistical anomalies
- Incidents recorded in the Poll Book
Despite legal challenges, the court and GECOM ignored calls to ensure the order did not violate constitutional rights or the Representation of the People Act regarding valid votes. The PPP ultimately benefitted from this process, which led to Irfaan Ali being “installed” as President on August 2, 2020, according to a U.S. report on Guyana.
Questionable Elections and the Voters List
The PPP has also benefited from questionable declarations in previous elections. In 2006, GECOM awarded the PPP seats initially meant for the AFC, thus increasing the PPP’s parliamentary majority. However, during the 2011 elections, an opposition-nominated GECOM commissioner thwarted the effort to award the PPP a seat that rightfully belonged to the opposition, which led to the PPP becoming a minority in Parliament.
In the 2020 elections, the List of Electors included 660,000 voters. Another concern driving the push for biometrics is the size of the voter list. Guyana’s population is estimated at 750,000 to 780,000, but the government has not released the 2022 Census, which has raised suspicions that the actual demographics may not be favorable to the PPP. In mid-2024, the number of registered voters was 718,000, but by January 2025, the Preliminary Voter List had ballooned to 735,000—a whopping increase of 17,000 voters in just six months.
Biometrics: A Solution to Electoral Fraud
Guyana Trades Union Congress (GTUC) General Secretary Lincoln Lewis, in a recent interview with this publication, insisted that the key to preventing massive electoral fraud is the introduction of biometrics. Lewis emphasised that there is ample evidence showing the PPP has historically benefited from fraudulent election practices, and this must come to an end.
He pointed out that when the trade union movement began advocating for one-man-one-vote in 1926, the concept was clear: a living person should present him or herself to a presiding officer on Election Day to cast his or her vote. Lewis stressed that this principle must be upheld, no matter the political outcome.
“No system should be allowed to facilitate electoral fraud, whether legitimate or not,” Lewis said. “Such practices undermine the principle of one-man-one-vote, and they must stop. Guyana needs biometrics in the next election, and GECOM, the Opposition, and the Government must work together—or separately—to make this possible.”
