Given our highly politicized climate, this is only going to be seen as a tainted process. Our position is that all stakeholders should be involved from the inception of a reform process.
‘As a minimum condition of electoral reforms the team recommends the urgent need for the total re-registration of all voters in Guyana’
Whatever rules the government intends to establish to make the electoral process ‘stronger, more transparent, more accountable and to ensure that it is manned by persons of high integrity and professional ethics’, the above quote is the main reform recommendation of the Report of the Caricom Observer Team for the Recount of the Guyana March 02, 2020, Elections, and should be an important element of the perform process. The CARICOM process is usually flaunted by the government but in a letter ‘All stakeholders should be involved from inception of electoral reform process’ (SN: 18/01/2021), the Electoral Reform Group (ERG), a body of citizens recently formed to aid the reform process, drew attention to an interview Attorney General Mr. Anil Nandlall gave to Kaieteur Radio on 9th January 2021 during which he outlined a process that could easily lead to the exclusion of CARICOM’s ‘minimum condition of electoral reforms.’ The ERG rightly expressed concerns over the AG’s report that ‘a small unit has been tasked with compiling requisite pieces of legislation to be reviewed in consultation with relevant stakeholders who will work together to correct the loopholes’ in the electoral process.
