GECOM Secretariat sees March as earliest time for polls
The Secretariat of the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) yesterday presented to the commissioners a draft schedule of timelines which sets the earliest date for General and Regional Elections as March 2020.
According to opposition-nominated commissioner Bibi Shadick, the proposals presented by Chief Elections Officer Keith Lowenfield will see elections held “one year and two days after the time provided for in the Constitution.”
Based on 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 (NRR). 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.
“We are opposed to that situation. We are insisting [and] we advised that HtH is aborted and therefore there should only be minimal use of data from HtH to identify persons who are first time registrants for addition… into a database during a claims and objections period and that will completely shorten the time-period required for an election and that election could hopefully be held no later than mid to late November,” opposition commissioner Robeson Benn told reporters following a meeting yesterday.
According to Benn and Shadick, the Secretariat is nowhere close to encoding the nearly 370,822 persons it has registered over the month-long HtH registration process.
“We are not anywhere near to them inputting all of that data. Over the last month, they have scanned approximately 100,000 of the registrants. They now buying scanners and working in four teams and so on but no verification,” Shadick indicated.
She lamented that the commission is considering producing new identification cards for the entire register and stressed again that such cards are not necessary for elections.
However, government-nominated commissioner Vincent Alexander has explained that the production of ID cards, which will be done locally, is to occur concurrent with elections preparations and therefore does not impact the timeline.
He further noted that the cross-matching of fingerprints, which will be completed using the contractor previously employed by the commission, is likely to take 16 days.
Both Alexander and his colleague Charles Corbin maintain that the March timeline is due to statutory days.
“I have no major contention with those timelines but we, as I said, in a consensual mood were looking at the activities which are not statutory to see how they could be curtailed,” Alexander said, while Corbin observed that this exercise only reduced the timeline by eight days.
Meanwhile, Director General of the Ministry of the Presidency Joseph Harmon told a postCabinet press briefing that President David Granger is still not prepared to
dissolve parliament without advice from GECOM with regards to an election date.
“The president has made it very clear that he is not going to dissolve parliament neither will he name a date for elections until such time as he is advised by GECOM that it is ready to provide for credible elections,” Harmon said.
He went on to claim that while the opposition has criticised the proposed merger of data, they have presented “no credible, practical and efficient alternative to what GECOM is suggesting.”
“It is GECOM which must determine their ability to deal with this in a timely way,” he maintained, adding that the merger being proposed has the support of government.
“It is a question of cross-matching information from house-to-house and information already there,” he stressed.
Mortally afraid
Speaking at his weekly press conference yesterday, Opposition Leader Bharrat Jagdeo reiterated that there is no need for the ongoing processes by GECOM to remove dead people from the “bloated” list. He said all that GECOM has to do is obtain the death certificates of the dead persons, publish the list of names and then remove them from the voters’ list. He said this would be a process that would be scrutinised by all the political parties who will ensure that the persons who are being taken off the list have indeed died.
He further reasoned that merging the data from the HtH exercise with the existing NRR will create a larger list that will now include names of persons already on the list as well as the new registrants.
“The idea is only the new people of the house-to-house exercise you are trying to find out. Who are those 2,000 new people? You can do it easily, otherwise in the claims and objections period, the 2,000 people can be easily registered,” he said, while adding that the new registrants would not be disenfranchised but only inconvenienced.
He stressed that new registrants should be registered through the claims and objections period as the law provides for, which would see the Registering Officer visiting the individual homes of the new registrants to verify.
“If we leave it to APNU, we would not have elections till next year and even then, they may not want elections. They are mortally afraid of elections,” he claimed. According to Jagdeo, the government is trampling on the rule of law and the Constitution of the country, which, he said, is isolating them.
“I know from the international community because I have been meeting with them and they are saying the Constitution and you have to have elections and Guyanese are saying the same thing,” he said.
Jagdeo was also questioned on whether he was satisfied with the performance of the new chairperson so far.
“…It must be very difficult for her to find an accommodation. I am sure maybe she doesn’t want to dismiss their concerns just like that but she also said, and I saw the statement that came out of the meeting with the private sector, that she has a role [and] she will try to hold elections in the shortest while possible and also that the Constitution is important. At some point in time, she would have to make the tough decision which is that we are going to respect the Constitution and stop the prevaricating by the commissioners on the other side,” he said.