Uncollected ID cards will remain available until polling day-Dr. Luncheon

Jul 14, 2011 News

Almost 40,000 ID cards would be continuously available up to polling day later this year, Head of the Presidential Secretariat, Dr Roger Luncheon, confirmed Monday last.
He said that Cabinet has been reassured by the public stance taken by Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM).
He said that the issue of disenfranchisement has been one of the ongoing concerns of Cabinet; this has raised the issue of the failure by people to provide source documents, such as birth certificates which are preventing thousands of eligible voters from being registered.
Luncheon said that since June 14, 2008 major political parties made a decision that a birth certificate would be a sole source document, “what it essentially meant was that the whole of Guyana had to get birth certificates, those who don’t have them in their possession.”
He explained previously that a less rigid system was used to get registered to vote, some persons had used their baptism paper, however, this was a controversial factor since the sentiment before 2008 was about the list of registrants not being legitimate.
“In 2008, all of us who sat in that Cabinet Room, stakeholders, were highly impressed with the likelihood of a National Register of Registrants that avoided any question, any dispute about its legitimacy and its facility in having elections call at a snap,” Dr. Luncheon said.
Luncheon further said that then a decision was made to only use the birth certificate as the only source document. He noted that hundreds of thousands of birth certificates had to be provided as a consequence of that decision.
Noting that another constraint was the provision of the information on the new source documents, Luncheon said lots of persons had an issue with the correlation of the different spelling, different names, and marital surnames amongst other issues on the ID cards; which resulted in many being alienated from the new ID’s that are being produced.
Since persons were accustomed to their own call names and spellings rather than their official registration, this is apart from the pictures appearing to be discoloured, darker or not appearing to look like the individual registrant.
He said in retrospect that from 2008 the social implications were not looked at; however, the issue should have been solved since persons should only register in one official name and unique identification and no other.
Adding that the constitution has specific laws under which GECOM functions, Dr Luncheon said the commission has been created to constitutionally discharge its obligations in registering people, conduct elections, and do demarcations.
Dr Luncheon said that Cabinet noted that there was a broad based consensus on addressing the issue, and cabinet anticipated a suitable GECOM response to enfranchise the voters.
GECOM recently disclosed more than 43,000 national identification cards remained uncollected. And at the end of 2010, following the 2008 House-to-House Registration, GECOM had more than 70,000 of these, despite pleadings for them to be collected.
“The statistics reveal that as at June 11, 2011, we still have in our possession 29,570 ID cards produced from the 2008 House-to-House Registration exercise, 1,613 from the Claims and Objections Exercise for Local Government Elections, 9,946 from the second Cycle of Continuous Registration, and 2,058 cards prepared as a result of applications for corrections/changes and replacements.
“This represents a total of 43,187 ID cards still in our possession as at June 11, 2011,” Dr. Surujbally recently disclosed.

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Uncollected ID cards will remain available until polling day-Dr. Luncheon

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