Following a meeting with the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) yesterday, Opposition Leader Bharrat Jagdeo said that a March elections date was totally out of the question, while another member of his delegation has claimed that GECOM Chair Justice (ret’d) Claudette Singh has committed to “working towards a timeline of having elections long before the end of the year.”
“We believe elections can be held long before the end of the year so we made a case for that,” Jagdeo told reporters after the meeting.
The Secretariat of the Guyana Elections Com-mission (GECOM) last week presented to the commissioners a draft schedule of timelines which sets the earliest date for General and Regional Elections as March 2020.
This followed a decision by Singh to end the house to house registration exercise, which began on July 20th, from August 31st and merge the data garnered with the National Register of Registrants (NRR). The commission is then expected to hold an extended claims and objections exercise before moving to the holding of elections. The PPP/C has been pressing for the holding of the polls as early as possible as a result of the passage of a no-confidence motion against the government since last December, which should have triggered elections within three months.
Though Jagdeo yesterday said he received “encouraging words” from Singh but declined to state what they were, parliamentarian Joseph Hamilton, a member of his delegation, later issued a video statement in which he claimed that the Chair agreed to work towards a timeline of having elections long before the end of the year.
Hamilton stated that because of this comment, the party was surprised and shocked at a subsequent press release from GECOM which “tried to justify this long drawn out timeline including many of the things that will take us months into holding an elections.”
In its release, GECOM stated that a Stabroek News article published on September 9, 2019 under the caption “Lengthy gap between Nomination, Election days in draft timeline for polls” failed to articulate the reasons why nominations day was placed 55 days before elections day instead of the usual timeline of between 32 and 34 days prior to elections day.
Public Relations Officer (PRO) Yolanda Ward stressed that the shift in the time is justifiable and does not breach any law and is definitely not intended to delay the holding of elections.
Ward sought to explain that historically some mandatory statutory timelines, which took as much as 10 days after Nominations Day, were bypassed once no errors were identified in the submitted list of nominees. However, she said that GECOM’s Operations Sub-Committee had decided at a meeting on July 17th, 2018, that all statutory timelines must be adhered to. The subcommittee is co-chaired by Commissioners Sase Gunraj and Charles Corbin and according to Ward their proposal was subsequently presented to and adopted by the full commission.
Additionally, according to the PRO, ballots will be printed overseas and the service provider has provided a 21 days duration for the printing only. Shipping is likely to be another 5 to 7 days.
“Upon arrival of the ballots in Guyana, there will be a process of extracting ballots to ship overseas to all the Non-Resident Ambassadors to allow for them to vote. This will take as much as 14 days to be completed,” she concluded.
Gunraj has since disagreed with the contents of the release, which he called inaccurate.
“It is misrepresenting the discussions of the commission. The operations sub-committee decided that the statutory timelines catered for in the law would not be breached. Every single other activity between elections day and nominations day we decided we will make efforts to have the time reduced in an effort to hold elections in a timely manner. This press release suggests that everything else is set in stone and the only thing that will be adjusted are those statutory timelines. I want to reject the contents of that press release. We have agreed to engage our suppliers to reduce the time to supply printing material so we can have elections early,” he argued, while adding that he remains unsure who authorised the GECOM release.
Gunraj also noted that no decisions were made at the nearly four-hour-long meeting yesterday and he stressed that the longest engagement was with the opposition delegation.
“We have made no decision [and] will meet again on Thursday,” he indicated.
Like Jagdeo, Gunraj described the engagement as “encouraging.”
“The Commission was very receptive of his ideas, both sides,” Gunraj said.
Jagdeo explained that he stressed to Singh that President David Granger has been using GECOM as the excuse for not holding elections and, therefore, it is the commission’s responsibility to comply with the constitution.
“We went through details of the merger to show that it will be merging unverified data with a verified database… that it will take a long time to do so; that the cross matching of fingerprints would not be helpful in identifying duplicate registration; that the NRR would be contaminated with multiple registration and that there is a simpler way to identifying new registrants because only the new registrants can be added to the list and that could be done swiftly in a claims and objections period,” Jagdeo said.
Though the opposition leader gave the impression that all those present supported his proposals, government-nominated commissioner Vincent Alexander has indicated that he challenged several of Jagdeo’s statements.
“He made the point that we had used this list repeatedly and that there were no complaints and I made the point that since 2011, internally, I raised concerns about list because in 2011 we saw spikes in certain parts of the country in terms of registration which seems not to reflect population. I said to him we’ve had concerns,” Alexander noted.
Additionally he challenged the “continuous mantra” that registration does not reflect a verified process when house-to-house registration by its very nature includes verification.
He explained that verification for continuous registration is office based, with registrants visiting GECOM, but in a house-to-house process the registration is originated at the home. “I consider this contrived because GECOM’s process has always been in house-to-house as in continuous registration, to give the parties the right to have scrutineers. If you do not take up that, you cannot come subsequently and say it is not verified because you did not have scrutineers. That’s contrived and that’s creating something that you yourself want to destroy having created it,” Alexander said.
