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9 months required for House-to House registration – GECOM

Feb 09, 2019 News

 

Deputy Chief Elections Officer, Roxanne Meyers, says that the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) Secretariat has calculated that House-to-House Registration would take nine months to be conducted.
She made this disclosure at a press conference yesterday at GECOM’s Kingston office, in the presence of Chairman of GECOM, James Patterson; Chief Elections Officer, Keith Lowenfield; and GECOM Public Relations Officer, Yolanda Ward.
Funds were set aside for the execution of House-to-House registration in Budget 2019. However, Meyers said that the passing of the No-Confidence Motion in the National Assembly on December 21 last year put GECOM’s plans for House-to-House registration on a shelf.
Despite this, the Commission asked the Secretariat to provide House-to-House Registration as an option to remedy the current Constitutional dilemma. The technical analysis, by the secretariat, revealed that House-to-House Registration would take nine months.
Even though the 90-day Constitutional deadline of March 19, 2019 is a month earlier than the date the Official List of Electors (OLE) would expire, GECOM’s Chief Election Officer, Keith Lowenfield, ruled out the possibility of General and Regional Elections occurring before that deadline, because GECOM would require 148 days to adequately prepare for such elections.
Thus, House-to-Registration is an option that is being considered to develop a new OLE. If continuous registration is held, in lieu of House-to-House, then that process would take 28 days, with an additional week being set aside for claims and objections.
PRO Ward said that the current OLE lists 633,155 voters, while the National Registrar of Registrants (NRR) lists 663,365 persons. The reason for this difference is because the last sets of continuous registration, as they should, considered the teenagers that would turn 18 by the next election date. That date could not have pre-empted the No-Confidence motion. Hence, not all of the persons on that list would be eligible to vote, if elections are held this year.
Several contentions were raised by A Partnership for National Unity + Alliance for Change (APNU+AFC) to support their advocacy for House-to-House registration this year. These included the removal of dead persons from the list, the addition of new voters, and the updating of electors’ addresses.
With the nine-month timeline given by the Secretariat, House-to-House would conclude by December of this year, if it were to commence today, causing a possible Election Day to move closer to the date set out by the Constitution under normal circumstances, than the March 19 deadline.
However, Lowenfield said that the Secretariat must wait on the directive from the Commission in order to start preparing. Chairman Patterson declined to reveal when the Commission would give a directive, or when it would vote on the way forward.

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