– no decision yet on extension
The Guyana Elections Commission (Gecom) has not registered the targeted number of persons it had estimated it would reach in the house-to-house registration exercise, which began on January 7 this year.
The exercise ended on July 7. The commission has not yet said whether it would extend the exercise to capture the approximately 158,000 persons still not registered. Gecom had projected that it would register over 591,000 people in the seven-month period. It has completed some 433,000 registrants.
At a press conference on Thursday, Cabinet Secretary Dr Roger Luncheon told reporters that in this regard he felt the exercise did not live up to its expectations. He said Cabinet noted the decision to end the exercise at its projected date. However, the feeling was that the process was dogged by innumerable problems.
Gecom Chairman Dr Steve Surujbally was not available for comment yesterday. However, Public Relations Officer Vishnu Persaud, in brief comments, explained that Gecom’s projection prior to the start of the process was calculated on the basis of the 2006 Official List of Electors (the voters list).
Prior to the exercise, he added, the commission had no scientific basis on which it could have said definitively how many persons on that list would have since died or migrated. “From this process now we have evidence because we went to homes and verified the names on that list,” he said.
He hesitated to comment further, saying that the commission intended to hold a press conference at which this matter among others would be discussed in detail.
Commenting on the exercise on Thursday, Luncheon was adamant that there were still thousands of unregistered persons and a pattern of low registration in certain communities.
According to him, concerns surrounding the process included the issue of specific source documents requested by the commission, which, he said, in some cases, caused some bona fide voters in previous elections, to withdraw from the process owing to dissatisfaction and resentment.
Responding to comments made by Surujbally in the media about the projections, Luncheon told reporters that any attempt by the Gecom chairman to denounce the projections “is despicable and warrants some explanations.”
According to him too, even though the commission has not yet pronounced on how it plans to capture the non-registered persons, the continuous registration exercise was being promoted.
However, he said he felt an extension of the house-to-house process was unlikely.
He said government’s concerns in this regard, mimicked those of others and there was a possibility of potential registrants being lost in a process which would be central and not have the full potential of a process where officials went from house to house.
“But we hope that the process would be more than enough and allow a national register of registrants… heaven help us if the exercise conceived in such good will and enjoyed such good all-round support would at the end of day be the source of electoral and other disputes,” Luncheon asserted.
He added that the commission would have to work assiduously to prevent any such dreaded occurrence.
He said the commission would have to show how it intends to handle the evident limitations of a centre-based continuous registration and at the same time avoid the obvious fall back on the “descendants of those who are habitual complainants of the lack of adequate number of registrants being actually registered.
“Whatever the process is, it is for Gecom to contend with and put mechanisms in place to prevent them from coming up,” he said.
