No to merging of voter registration data

Dear Editor, The insistence of the caretaker coalition government for the data from the unscrutinised house-to-house registration to be merged with the National Register of Registrants Database (NRRD) – which has been updated through several cycles of continuous registration and used as the basis for the last several elections, including the 2015 General and Regional Elections that led to the APNU+AFC coalition taking office – must be rejected as a perpetuation of delay tactics.

Any merger with the NRRD is worrisome for several reasons. Firstly, the merger of the data with the existing National Register of Registrants will contaminate the database and it may take months to address any such contamination. Secondly, the data gathered is suspect since the gathering of said information was not scrutinised. Thirdly, the form used in the house-to-house registration was not the statutory form required for such a purpose.

Editor, it is clear that the push for a merger is premised on the caretaker coalition government’s obsession with holding on to power – even if it means trampling of the Constitution of Guyana, which mandated that elections be held within three months of the successful passage of the no-confidence motion –that is by March 21, 2019.

The fact that the caretaker coalition government has a complicit partner within the Secretariat of the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) is also not lost on the Guyanese people, given the options that were presented on the way forward by the Secretariat. On Friday, we saw another statutory GECOM meeting concluded without any serious talk about preparations for elections.

There can be no more delays, since Guyana is already over five months past the constitutional deadline for elections.

Additionally, Editor, the comments by the Director General of the Ministry of the Presidency, Joseph Harmon, as quoted by News Room in an article on September 6, 2019, headlined, ‘No ‘credible, practical’ alternative to merger of House-to-House data – Harmon’, are misleading at best. While Mr Harmon insists that opponents of the merger have provided no “credible, practical and efficient alternative,” he selectively forgets that the time-tested option of Claims and Objections is available. This proposal we have been making, which will capture new registrants and sanitise the list of those who are deceased, among other things.

There is no reason why extraneous matters should be allowed to cloud the situation at hand. A Preliminary List of Electors should be extracted from the NRRD and a Claims and Objections exercise should commence almost immediately to allow Guyana to move toward an election and end the uncertainty plaguing all sections of society.

Let’s all be reasonable and act with integrity.

Yours faithfully, Bishop Juan Edghill PPP/C Parliamentarian