The House to House Registration is over

Jul 09, 2008 Features / Columnists

The Guyana Elections Commission says that it has ended the registration programme and has captured almost all the people from the age of fourteen to those who are eligible to vote.

The figure is a low 435,000, suggesting that the population is shrinking but this is something that the government will be investigating.

From the outset the government raised eyebrows when there was the announcement that the Guyana Elections Commission was refusing to use the identification cards issued for the elections of 2006.

This was rather surprising because the identification cards were produced after a registration that cost millions of dollars.

When questioned, the Guyana Elections Commission then told the nation that some people who secured identification cards should not have been given those cards. Surely the Guyana Elections Commission wasted taxpayers’ money because millions of dollars went into the exercise.

The political opposition kept insisting that the voters’ list was padded, that there were names of fictitious people, that people who no longer lived in Guyana were there and while they actually do not live here they would come home and vote at election time.

The latter could not be the case unless these people were filthy rich or worked with themselves, people who live overseas simply cannot pack their bags at their whim and fancy and come to Guyana whenever there is an election.

But to prove to them that elections are always above board, the government decided that there should be house to house registration.

There was then talk that those missed should be removed from the list but there was no law for this to happen. The elections of 2006 were held and it is now clear that many people did not go to the polls.

While some of the critics blamed voter apathy and the government, others proclaimed that migration had an effect on the voting population.

Almost immediately the political opposition demanded yet another house to house registration. The government recognized that this was a costly exercise and wholly unnecessary but once again, to pacify those who have doubts, the government acquiesced.

The elections commission changed the rules, demanding that people have source documents which would verify that they are Guyanese.

GECOM decided that it would only accept birth certificates, marriage certificates and passports. But many Guyanese for one reason or the other do not have such documents.

The government moved to ensure that the Office of the Registrar General was properly staffed for the anticipated influx of applicants but then again, many people were not even registered at birth.

A mistake like that meant that people had to seek the services of lawyers to simply establish their identity.
The exercise has ended and many people have not secured these source documents.

The government is concerned because unless the situation is corrected, then many Guyanese would be disenfranchised and of course, the critics would blame the government because that is the trend these days.

What the critics seem all too willing to ignore is the fact that nearly one billion dollars went into the exercise to acquire equipment and later to pay the people on the ground who were entrusted with the task of registering the potential voters.

The opposition should have had an interest in this and while many simply talked about an interest they seemed to be more interested in getting money for their people.

In other countries the various political parties would fund their own operations but in Guyana all expect the government to fund their respective party’s operation.

And when this does not happen, these very parties that have as their objective a continuous challenge blame the government.

How else could one explain the court challenge because the government did not give money to every political party to scrutinize the house to house registration?

But the registration exercise is not over. There is to be continuous registration and the government is going to put measures in place to ensure that all those who need their birth certificates get them.

It is in the interest of the government to ensure that whatever happens, there must never be a complaint about the voters’ list again.

There must never be legal challenges to the elections and above all, people must come to accept that there is more to life than elections and registration.

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The House to House Registration is over

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