GECOM extends Claims and Objections period to 42 days

Oct 02, 2019 News

– Will not affect readiness for Elections date

By Kemol King

Claims and Objections will run for 42 days, and not 35 days as was previously decided on by the Commission.
During a statutory meeting yesterday, the Commission voted to extend the period. However, the three Opposition-nominated Commissioners did not support this vote.

GECOM Chair, Claudette Singh

Commissioner Robeson Benn

There was some disagreement among the Commissioners about how long the exercise should last. It all started when an order, the National Registration (Residents) Order No. 70 of 2019, had incorrectly set the date at 49 (42+7) days. Commissioners Robeson Benn and Sase Gunraj had hosted a press conference, during which they pointed out the two-week difference between the initial decision of the Commission, for 35 days, and the Order.
Kaieteur News, via a source at GECOM, had been notified that the Chair of the Commission, (ret’d) Justice Claudette Singh S.C. swiftly moved to have that fixed. But on Monday, it turned out that the change she made in the Order was for 42 days, instead of 35. The Opposition-nominated Commissioners were also dissatisfied with this, and had vowed to raise the issue at yesterday’s statutory meeting.
After the meeting, Benn approached reporters, describing the vote to extend the period as an “unsatisfactory occurrence”, as he, Gunraj and Bibi Shadick said that a decision on the period of the exercise should not have been revisited.

Commissioner Sase Gunraj

A major point of contention for those Commissioners is that the Chief Elections Officer, Keith Lowenfield, in both instances, added extra days to the 35 initially decided on, in defiance of the Commission’s vote. It was revealed, yesterday, that Lowenfield made the addition because, in initially deciding on 35 days, the Commission had been working with a work-plan which placed General and Regional Elections on February 24, 2020, according to Shadick. Since the President announced that elections would be held on March 2, 2020 – a week later – Lowenfield reportedly made the decision himself, in the interest of giving the electorate more time to have their claims and objections sorted out.

Commissioner Bibi Shadick

Commissioner Vincent Alexander, when pointed to the fact that the Secretariat acted in defiance of the Commission’s decision, defended the Secretariat, stating that it “advisably” made the decision. He further provided that the change of the period is not fundamental; that it will not affect GECOM’s ability to be ready by Election Day.
Gunraj, however, still opposes the extension to 42 days, and stated that the Commission is allowing the “mischief” of the Secretariat “to get away”.
Shadick said that the Chair told her, as late as Monday night, that she would have the period corrected to 35 days, and that she is disappointed about how things turned out.
“We have another Chairman who is going against decisions of the Commission without the Commission’s inquiry.” Shadick said.
Otherwise, it was revealed yesterday that the Claims and Objections exercise will run all day, instead of only afternoons, as has been the practice in the past. The Secretariat intends to set up 41 sub-offices, “mostly at schools,” Shadick said. The Commission has undertaken to study that proposal.

Commissioner Vincent Alexander

Encoding of House-to-House Data
On the encoding of the data from the suspended House-to-House exercise, Alexander said that more than 180,000 entries have already been encoded and dispatched for cross-matching. He said that the remaining amount to be encoded is somewhere in the vicinity of 300,000 entries. He also revealed that encoding had been temporarily suspended to facilitate the preparation of the Preliminary List of Electors (PLE). The encoding process is expected to resume soon. The timeline for its completion, he said, is within the period of claims and objections, which ends on October 11, 2019.
The Commission had previously decided, when it suspended House-to-House registration, to merge the data with the National Register of Registrants (NRR). Since the Chair decided on a comprehensive work-plan for preparation for General and Regional Elections, the plan to merge the data became a thing of the past.
In principle, however, Alexander stated that the Commission had agreed that the data should still be used as a comparator in the Claims and Objections process.

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