The election laws are to be amended to ensure to ensure there is greater accountability in remuneration of scrutineers, while requiring meaningful consultation among the opposition on allocation of payment.

The government tabled the Election laws (Amendment) Bill 2009 for first reading in the National Assembly on Thursday last.

The Bill seeks to amend Section 8 (1) of Election Laws (Amendment) Act of 2000, substituting a proviso that states that scrutineers for the governing party and the combined opposition shall be paid remuneration, in accordance with an administrative scheme made by the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) after it “is satisfied from supporting evidence that the scrutineer has satisfactorily performed his duties.”

Further, the Bill also proposes to insert a new subsection that stipulates that the Opposition Leader, after meaningful consultation with other opposition parties in the National Assembly, shall submit the list of scrutineers of the combined opposition to be remunerated. The new section is seemingly intended to address the issues raised about allocations for scrutineering activities by the Alliance For Change (AFC) and the Guyana Action Party/Rise Organise and Rebuild (GAP-ROAR), which had been excluded during the house-to-house registration process in 2007.

Last year, the Court of Appeal upheld a ruling that GECOM should have allocated monies to the opposition parliamentary parties for scrutineering activities on the basis of the number of seats they held, and not exclusively grant the main opposition party a lump sum. GECOM had handed out half of the $100 million approved for scrutineering activities by the National Assembly to the PNCR.

The AFC and GAP-ROAR parties subsequently challenged the decision, arguing that the PNCR did not constitute the combined parliamentary opposition but was merely one constituent of it.