November or March?

-GECOM Chair to make poll date decision

Chairman of the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM), Justice (Rtd) Claudette Singh, will today at 10.30 am disclose the date she is proposing for the holding of General and Regional Elections.

This is according to Sase Gunraj, and Vincent Alexander, Opposition and Government-nominated GECOM Commissioners respectively, who spoke to media after a meeting of GECOM’s Commissioners yesterday afternoon.

The Chairman’s date would have to be communicated to President David Granger who will then have to make a decision on elections. Granger has insisted that only GECOM can say when elections can be held based on its readiness.

Alexander told the media that this decision was taken after a proposal was made by fellow government-nominated GECOM Commissioner Charles Corbin, who proposed March 2019. He added that the proposal included the possibility of negotiations that could see elections occurring at an earlier time, although he did not say how much earlier.

Gunraj, he added, who was also expected to make a presentation, failed to do so. During a meeting on Tuesday, 17 September, it was agreed that both men would make presentations toward determining the date on which elections will be held.

In lieu of presentation, Alexander said, Gunraj only “contended that elections should be held by November, and they were not prepared to discuss anything else.” Gunraj had told the media on Tuesday that he was confident that his timeline will be adopted.

Gunraj, speaking to Stabroek News, after initially refusing to comment extensively on the outcome of yesterday’s meeting, said “I considered the timelines for the holding of elections and I deliberately did not present a proposal because I did not want to get involved in a protracted debate about irrelevant issues that would have further delayed the decisionmaking process of the Chairman. In that regard, after considering my timeline, and determining that it was eminently possible to hold elections before the end of the year, I chose instead to reiterate that position to the chairman and commission instead of making a formal proposal.”

Alexander said that Singh’s concern all along has been election timeframes, and whether proposed timeframes could be approached in a way to allow for elections at the earliest possible time. It was against this backdrop, he explained, that the Commissioners were asked to demonstrate, having consideration of the various statutory timeframes, how they arrived at their proposals of November, and March.

“They did not make that presentation,” Alexander said, adding that “it’s now left to the Chairman to make a determination which she said she will do after studies, and after contacting the providers. That announcement should be made tomorrow.”

Encoding

Providing details of Corbin’s proposal, Alexander said that “the presentation shows the critical path and the noncritical path…”

He further said that Corbin’s proposal “sees encoding being taken off the critical path, thus being able to proceed to claims and objections, and a preliminary list while the encoding continues. So the information being coded… would not be holding up the process.”

Gunraj has been critical of the time coding has taken thus far, saying on Tuesday that encoding of the data gathered from house-to-house registration has been compounding pre-existing concerns. He noted on Tuesday that less than half of the information of the 370,000 registrants captured during house-to-house registration had been completely digitised, despite a September 16 deadline for encoding.

He also said that he could not say exactly when claims and objections would start, but offered that it would “not be very long from now”, and that it would last for about 27 days.