Private court action filed to block GECOM’s house-to-house

Apr 17, 2019 News

A private court action has been filed aagainst Chief Elections Officer, Keith Lowenfield, and the Guyana Elections Commission to halt any House-to-House registrations.
Early elections are looming and there are fears by especially the Opposition that the exercise could last months, and would disenfranchise thousands of Guyanese living abroad.
The court case would be seen as critical especially to the PPP, which has thousands of its supporters living abroad.
There has been a recommendation that persons not present during the house-to-house will not be allowed to vote.
According to the Fixed Date Application released yesterday by lawyers, the case is being filed by Bibi Zeenatoun, whose local address is in East Street, and who said she is a pensioner who worked in the UK as a teacher with an adult son who lives in Guyana.
Zeenatoun, in court documents insisted that she voted in the Local Government Elections in 2018.
She is being represented by Attorneys-at-law Mohabir Anil Nandlall, Marcia Nadir-Sharma, Manoj Narayan, Sasha Mahadeo-Narayan and Rajendra Jaigobin.
According to the applicant, she is advised that there is no law, which requires the respondents to conduct house-to-house registration for the purposes of creating a new National Register of Registrants for elections purposes.
Rather, the respondents – GECOM and its CEO – are mandated by law to engage in continuous registration with a baseline of the year 2001 and must follow the criteria established by the law and their own practice.
“I am advised by my Attorneys-at-law and do verily believe that there are no laws that require proof of residency in Guyana as being an element of qualification for registration to the National Register of Registrants,” Zeenatoun said.
“I am advised by my Attorneys-at-law and do verily believe that I am a registered elector in Guyana and during the Respondents’ present proposed House-to-House Registration exercise, I will be excluded and will cease to be a registered elector and will be denied the opportunity and right to vote in any upcoming elections in Guyana.”
Among other things, the applicant is asking for a declaration that the proposed House-to-House registration exercise to be embarked upon by the respondents in or about June 2019, to create a new National Register of Registrants from which will be extracted a new Official List of Electors, shall be unconstitutional, ultra vires, illegal, null, void and of no effect.
She also wants a declaration that the proposed exercise will exclude existing qualified registrants currently on the National Register of Registrants and on the Official List of Electors, shall be unconstitutional, ultra vires, illegal, null, void and of no effect.
She is also asking that a Conservatory Order restraining the Respondents by themselves, their servants and their agents from embarking upon House-to-House Registration scheduled to commence in June 2019, or any date thereafter.
Nandlall, a former Attorney General for the PPP, explained that the proceedings are filed to protect the constitutional rights of thousands of registered electors to vote at the next elections from all sides of the political divide.
“The nation is well acquainted with the political duplicity and electoral trickery and artifice of the PNC. Quite apart from their inglorious record of rigging elections in 1996, they supported a legislation in the National Assembly to make an ID card a valid requirement to vote but when they lost the 1997 elections, they challenged those elections on the ground that the very requirement of that ID card was unconstitutional and unlawful, causing those elections to be vitiated.”

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Private court action filed to block GECOM’s house-to-house

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