Lengthy gap between Nomination, Election days in draft timeline for polls

The draft schedule of timelines presented by the Secretariat of the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) includes a 55day gap between Nomination Day and Elections Day, according to a source.

This is nearly double the minimum of 32 days provided for by law. According to statute, Nomination Day - the day parties submit their list of candidates, must be no less than 32 days before Polling Day.

This number has guided the actions of the commission in the past with the April 7th Nomination Day for the 2015 general and regional elections falling 34 days before the May 11th Polling Day. For the 2011 elections, Nomination Day was October 27th, exactly 32 days before the November 28 Polling Day.

However, for the two most recent Local Government Elections, the gap widened to 53 and 51 days respectively.

During this period, the Secretariat routinely procures sensitive materials such as ballot papers after verifying that all those nominated are suitably eligible.

According to the source, while the preferred supplier has suggested a minimum of 35 days for the printing of ballot papers, the Secretariat is opting instead to have the process completed over a longer period.

This is one of the decisions which opposition-nominated GECOM commissioners have highlighted as baffling.

According to Commissioner Sase Gunraj, the timelines are just another example of delay tactics.

“The proposals are ridiculous and demonstrate an intention to delay elections at all cost. If there is a will to hold elections in a timely manner, a way will be found to do so but instead we continue to hear excuses after excuses and frankly, after nine months of hearing excuses, we are utterly fed up of those excuses because as fast at the efficacy of a proffered excuse is exhausted, another rears its head and it’s unfortunately countenanced while right thinking people are left to suffer the consequence of not holding elections,” Gunraj said.

The Secretariat has presented to the commissioners a draft schedule of timelines which sets the earliest date for General and Regional Elections as March 2020.

If this draft is accepted, elections will be held one year after they became due following the passage of the December 21st, 2018 no-confidence motion against the APNU+AFC government.

Elections were due on March 21st, 2019 but several legal challenges have so far delayed the holding of these elections.

Following the most recent ruling on the matter, GECOM Chair retired Justice Claudette Singh decided that the house-to-house (HtH) registration exercise, which began on July 20th, would be suspended from August 31st and the data garnered would be merged with the National Register of Registrants. The commission is then expected to hold an extended claims and objections exercise before moving to the holding of elections.

While the government-nominated commissioners have expressed support for these plans, the opposition-nominated commissioners have repeatedly claimed that a merging of information will unnecessarily delay the holding of elections and “contaminate” the register as the data is unverified.

Stabroek News understands that the Secretariat has proposed to complete the encoding of 370,822 registrants from the recently concluded HtH registration exercise over a period of two weeks. This is despite the fact that only 112,000 of these registrants were encoded over the month of August.

In order to speed up the process, the Secretariat has employed three teams who will work eight-hour shifts over the coming days. Previously, only one team worked to encode all the data collected, according to the source.

Following this encoding, it is expected that the commission will review the project report over a 10-day period following which a contractor will, over 16 days, conduct fingerprint crossmatching to verify the data.

Any queries resulting from this process are expected to be investigated over a period of 28 days.

Altogether, it will be more than two months before a preliminary list of electors is published and the claims and objections process activated.

This process is scheduled to last 21 days followed by the publication of a revised list of electors (RLE) in early to midJanuary.

Nomination Day comes after the RLE is published.