GECOM avoids online disclosure of House-to-House data

Oct 27, 2019 News

The Secretariat of the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) had committed to publishing the House-to-House data for public scrutiny, but it turns out that the publication of that data has been limited to the GECOM registration offices.

The House-to-House lists alongside the Preliminary List of Electors are a GECOM office

GECOM Public Relations Officer, Yolanda Ward, told this publication that the lists have not been published online.
From a perusal of the list at GECOM’s Croal Street Registration office, Kaieteur News determined that the Secretariat did not place the entire list at every registration office, but only the lists for the persons registered in a certain registration district at their respective offices.
There isn’t one House-to-House list, but several; each one for a specific division.
On each list, the registrants are listed in the following order: registrants that have been struck off of the Preliminary List of Electors (PLE), registrants that have been added to the PLE, and registrants whose information has been corrected.
The public’s ability to scrutinise the House-to-House data is drastically reduced by the lack of availability of these lists online and at all GECOM registration offices. The lists are posted besides the PLE, which is there for the ongoing Claims and Objections exercise.
The data obtained from House-to-House registration has been a matter of contention for some time now, since it was not supported by the Opposition, and since the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) had not sent scrutineers to participate.
About 370,000 persons were registered during the exercise, with about 336,000 being over the age of 18. The others are 14 to 17 years old.
The last batch of encoded data should be sent off by now for fingerprint cross matching, as several Commissioners informed reporters last week that all of the data had been encoded, and that they had already received a report on the first batch of cross-matched prints after they got back.
Several Commissioners have revealed that it is still unclear how they data will be used, and that the Chair would have to make a definitive statement on that matter.

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