Dear Editor,
The Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) recently confirmed that this year’s Official List of Electors (OLE) is complete, with 661,028 eligible voters.
It is my contention that this number (661,028) is statistically impossible based on the data in the Guyana Population and Housing Census 2012, which is available on the Government of Guyana Bureau of Statistics website.
The total population of Guyana in 2012 was 746,955 persons. If we assume that this number is unchanged, then the number of eligible voters as a percentage of the total population would be
(661,028 / 746,955 X 100) = 88.5 %. This means that 88.5 per cent of persons in Guyana are eligible to vote and are 18 years and above. If this were indeed the case, then only 11.5 per cent of persons in Guyana or 85,927 would be between the ages of 0 and 17 years!
Obviously, there are currently more than 85,927 persons between the ages of 0 and 17 years in Guyana at the present time! I say this because in the 2012 census, there were 267,246 persons between the ages of 0 and 17 years in Guyana, which was 35.8% of the population. If we were to assume that the demographics have remained unchanged, then the percentage of persons 18 years and above would be approximately 64.2% of the current population or a total of 479,545 persons.
It is clear therefore that it is statistically impossible for the OLE to have 661,028 eligible voters when there are only 479,545 persons currently aged 18 years and above in Guyana.
One may argue that the 2012 census numbers are not valid today or that it is not possible to accurate verify that the demographics have remained unchanged. My position is that it should be very simple for the Bureau of Statistics to use the Ministry of Education current records of primary and secondary schools’ enrolment plus records of births for the last five years to estimate the number of persons between the ages of 0 and 17 years currently in Guyana.
Yours faithfully,
Tara Singh
