President to address nation on elections today

Sep 25, 2019 News

…GECOM decides:

– ‘Claims and Objections’ to begin October 1, will run for 35 days
– Qualifying date for electors is December 31
– Commission will engage the United States and the Commonwealth as advisors during electoral process

President David Granger will deliver an address this evening, after consulting with Cabinet on the issue of holding credible General and Regional Elections in Guyana at the earliest possible time. He is expected to bring an end to days of protests by the political opposition, the People’s Progressive Party (PPP).

GECOM has decided that Claims and Objections will start next Tuesday

President David Granger consulted Cabinet yesterday on a date for General and Regional Elections

Opposition Leader, Bharrat Jagdeo, had promised that Granger, who he terms as an illegal President, would face the brunt of the party’s frustration until he names a date for elections.
The President faced protests at several venues, including at the Pegasus Hotel, last Thursday, where the protest received condemnation from Government officials for the nature in which it was carried out.
On the other hand, several civil society bodies and members of the international community called on the President to set an election date immediately. Granger had maintained, up until that day, that he could not set a date for elections until he heard from GECOM on its readiness. On the morning of the protest, he no longer benefitted from that excuse. The Chair of the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM), (ret’d) Justice Claudette Singh S.C., had informed the President, after weeks of intense deliberations at the level of the Commission, that the Secretariat would be ready to hold elections by the end of February 2020.
Furthermore, the most recent statutory meeting of the Commission, yesterday, concluded with three decisions.
The first decision, made unanimously, is that the qualifying date for electors is December 31, 2019, meaning that the persons will have to be 18 years old by that day in order to be eligible to vote in the election.
The second decision, also unanimous, is that Claims and Objections will start next Tuesday, October 1, 2019. It will run for 35 days (28+7).
It should be noted that Attorney General and Minister of Legal Affairs, Basil Williams, filed an application for a stay of Chief Justice Roxane George’s ruling on House-to-House Registration. However, it is unclear what practical effect that would have on the work-plan GECOM has chosen. When he notified members of the media of his intention to file for the stay, Williams had said that there could be no question of the merger of the House-to-House data with the National Register of Registrants (NRR), but that was at a time when it was generally thought that the merger would precede Claims and Objections. Now, it is the opposite.
Commissioner Vincent Alexander reiterated yesterday that the encoding process of the House-to-House data was taken off of the critical path, thereby allowing it to run concurrently with the Claims and Objections process. The House-to-House data will only be used as a “comparator”, according to Alexander, during the Claims and Objections process.
Asked whether the Attorney General’s stay, if granted, would have any practical effect on the current work-plan decided on by the GECOM Chair, Alexander said that the Commission is not focusing on that, and that it would “cross that bridge if” it gets to it.
The third decision, according to Commissioner Vincent Alexander, is that GECOM will engage the United States Government and the Commonwealth as advisors during the electoral process. Alexander noted that Commissioner Robeson Benn was opposed to this decision.

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