Public will be allowed to scrutinise contentious House-to-House data

Public will be allowed to scrutinise contentious House-to-House data – GECOM Commissioner

Oct 05, 2019 News

After the most recent statutory meeting of the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) yesterday, Commissioner Bibi Shadick informed reporters that Chief Registrations Officer, Keith Lowenfield, is expected to prepare a report on the suspended House-to-House exercise.

Commissioner Bibi Shadick

The report will be put up for public scrutiny.
Before that report is made, the data must be encoded by the Secretariat.
Of the 370,000 persons registered during the suspended House-to-House exercise, 336,000 were persons above 18 years of age, while the others are 14 to 17 years old.
Last night this publication was informed of the progress on encoding by Commissioner Vincent Alexander, who said earlier this week that 180,000 entries have already been included. He had also said that the encoding process was temporarily suspended to facilitate the preparation of the Preliminary List of Electors (PLE).
Kaieteur News understands that the first batch of encoded data had already been sent to the international supplier to be cross-matched. That batch of cross-matched fingerprints is expected to return from overseas by next week. After that, the final batch will be sent.
Lowenfield is yet to tell the Commission how much of, and what aspects of the data will be put up for scrutiny.
Commissioner Charles Corbin said that the data will be up as soon as the encoding and cross-matching are complete.
The verification of this data is important to the Opposition and its supporters. People’s Progressive Party (PPP) General Secretary, Bharrat Jagdeo, had opposed the exercise even before it started. He had urged his supporters to boycott the exercise. He had also sided with a legal challenge to the exercise. Leading the challenge was Attorney-at-Law Christopher Ram.
Even when the exercise was suspended by the Commission after the new Chair, (ret’d) Justice Claudette Singh (S.C.) was installed, Jagdeo and his party opposed the intended merger of the data with the National Register of Registrants (NRR). He had reasoned that because the PPP didn’t send scrutineers as is typical, the integrity of the data is questionable.
On the other hand, Attorney General and Minister of Legal Affairs, Basil Williams, filed an application for a Stay to be granted by the Chief Justice, Roxane George-Wiltshire, of the effects of her ruling on Ram’s challenge to House-to-House Registration.
Though she had ruled that the process is not illegal, her declaration that removing persons from the list should not be, caused Williams to appeal her ruling. He had told reporters, “There can be no question of the merger.”
The Commission had, later on, decided that it wouldn’t merge the data in the way it had planned, as it decided to begin Claims and Objections before the encoding is completed, in the interest of saving time. Alexander had said that the House-to-House data encoding would be completed during the Claims and Objections period, and that it would be used as a “comparator” in the process.
Shadick said that she is not concerned about whether the data is merged, she just wants to ensure that entries are not duplicated on the list.

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