The Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) will bring the ongoing national house-to-house registration exercise to a premature end on Saturday, August 31st, following a decision by its Chairperson, retired judge Claudette Singh, in order to facilitate preparations for general elections.
At GECOM’s statutory meeting yesterday, Justice Singh listened to the proposals from both the government and opposition-nominated commissioners on the way forward before deciding that “Order 25 of 2019 published in the Official Gazette should be amended for the exercise to conclude on 31st August, 2019 instead of 20th October, 2019.” The information compiled over the last month will be merged with the current National Register of Registrants Database.
The decision has been made, according to the commission, in order to facilitate preparation for elections.
“…GECOM has an obligation to produce a credible Official List of Electors (OLE) in the first instance and ultimately credible elections within the shortest possible time…,” it said in a statement after meeting, before adding that the Commission will move to ensure all arrangements for the publication of a credible Preliminary List of Electors (PLE) before commencement of an extensive Claims and Objections (C&O) exercise.
Up to press time this morning there was no statement from the government or its constituents APNU and the AFC on the decision by the GECOM Chair.
While there was no vote on the issue, both government and opposition-nominated commissioners have acquiesced to the Chair-person’s position.
“The Commission Chairman listened to all of the arguments and as you know the Commission Chairman is in large respect the balance factor in GECOM, so what the Chairman pronounces has to be seen as a decision of the Commission,” government-nominated commissioner Vincent Alexander told reporters outside of GECOM’s headquarters.
Alexander who has been a staunch advocate for house-to-house registration as a means to cleanse the list of migrant voters, said it is no longer about what he wants.
“It is not a matter of what I support, it is a matter of what decision the Commission has made,” he said, before adding that the truncated process is “not the perfect method that we were working towards but also not abandonment that others had been working towards.”
The Commission indicated in its statement that the data garnered from the exercise must be merged with the existing National Register of Registrants Database. The statement claimed this to be in keeping with the Chief Justice’s ruling on August 14th, 2019, that house-to-house registration is not unlawful.
Not be discarded
According to Alexander, it is important that the data will not be discarded. “What is important in the first instance is that the house-to-house information will not be discarded… [this] information is integral to the process. The process will go on and all the information garnered in the process will be taken into consideration for further compilation of the voters’ list,” he maintained.
However, the opposition People’s Progressive Party/ Civic (PPP/C) is not in favour of this aspect of the Chairperson’s decision. According to a statement issued by the party, while the decision to end the registration process is the only logical decision that could have been made, the planned merger of data will not improve the quality or ‘credibility’ of the database. Instead, the party said it will further contaminate the National Register of Registrants and cause further delays in the holding of elections. This position was explained by the PPP/C-nominated commissioners. “I maintain that information from house-to-house is unverified data and as a consequence it should not be used,” Commissioner Sase Gunraj told reporters, while his colleague Robeson Benn argued that “any merging or verification of data by using house-to-house data is wrong.”
Benn maintained that it will take a long time to merge the information and will contaminate the National Register of Registrants since a large number of the person registered during the exercise will appear as duplicates and each will have to be investigated in keeping with the previous practice of the Commission.
The party in turn questioned what data exactly is being merged with the National Register of Registrants Database. “Is it the entire 270,000-plus persons that GECOM claimed to have registered, including persons who were re-registered? If it is only the new registrants, why embark on this process, which will take several months to be completed, when it could easily be done in a Claims and Objections period,” it asked.
GECOM has indicated that as of last Saturday, 297,126 persons have been registered.
Additionally the party questioned the link between the Chief Justice’s decision and GECOM’s decision to merge the data. “This is an attempt to distort the ruling of the High Court. Nowhere in the ruling of the Chief Justice did she direct any such merger of data garnered from the house-to-house registration with the National Register of Registrants.” the party noted
These and several other questions are likely to be answered at next week’s meeting, when the GECOM Secretariat produces timetables for each of the identified processes.
Timeline
The secretariat is expected to provide a timeline for the possible merger of the house-to-house
registration data and the registration database, as well as a timeline for the “extensive claims and objections exercise.”
It is only after this exercise is concluded and a list of electors produced that a date for elections is traditionally identified.
GECOM has recently been under scrutiny over its readiness to proceed with elections as a result of President David Granger holding to the position that it must advise him of readiness for the polls. The elections are due as a result of the National Assembly’s passage of a no-confidence motion against the government last December. The constitution requires that elections be held within three months of the passage of a no-confidence motion against government, unless an extension is granted by not less than two-thirds of the elected members of the National Assembly. However, legal challenges to the validity of the passage of the motion in part stalled preparations.
GECOM’s decision to proceed with a planned three-month-long house-to-house registration from July 20th, based on a majority vote by government-nominated members and then Chairman James Patterson, resulted in a legal challenge by attorney Christopher Ram in light of general elections being required.
Based on his challenge, acting Chief Justice Roxane George-Wiltshire ruled that the registration exercise is not unconstitutional. The judge, however, cautioned that existing registrants cannot just be deleted from the GECOM database unless certain criteria provided by law are met—that being by death or by specified means of disqualification. She has also said the Commission must be cognisant of the “extraordinary circumstances” under which it is currently operating, given the passage of the no-confidence motion.
As a result, the decision called into question the rationale behind continuing with the exercise as “cleansing” the database of deceased and migrant registrants had been one of the arguments for it.
Attorney General Basil Williams has since appealed that ruling. He has argued that “residency” is under the Registration Act a criteria for registration and called for the Chief Justice’s ruling to be altered in this respect.
