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List of 20,000+ unverified registrants will be published by weekend – Commissioners
The Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) will publish the names of over 20,000 persons who have not collected their identification cards, in the four daily newspapers. The persons on the list will also be written to by the GECOM Secretariat.
Commissioner Vincent Alexander
Commissioner Sase Gunraj
Kaieteur News understands that this lot does not only include persons registered in 2008, but registration exercises as recent as last year. GECOM is exploring the possibility of including on the list when each person was registered.
Commissioner Sase Gunraj spoke to reporters after the Commission’s Statutory Meeting yesterday outside of GECOM’s Kingston headquarters, where he expressed his displeasure and that of his fellow Opposition nominated colleagues at the fact that the Chair, Justice Claudette Singh, is powering through with this decision.
The Commissioner said that he and his colleagues are currently exploring several options to take action for the prevention of that process.
Gunraj also said that during a meeting with A New and United Guyana (ANUG) yesterday, Ralph Ramkaran, and his colleagues expressed concern about the potential non-inclusion of thousands of registrants on the Revised List of Electors (RLE).
Ramkaran reportedly raised the question of whether there may be misinformation being peddled by the Public Relations Officer (PRO) Yolanda Ward, on matters before GECOM. Commissioner Vincent Alexander said that that assessment might be unfair to Ward, because the suggestion seems to be that she has “done her own thing”.
Clarity needed on use of House-to-House data
The Commission yesterday discussed, at length, the use of the House-to-House registration data. While utterances from Ward and Commissioner Charles Corbin indicate that the recently published House-to-House lists should be treated with the same procedures as Claims and Objections, Gunraj said that there has been no procedure set out by the Commission or by the Secretariat on what is to be done with the data.
Gunraj said that there have been no reports about any objections being done to any of the names on the House-to-House lists. He suggested though that this is likely because they were not educated on how to treat with the data.
Alexander admitted that this matter was a point of contention, but suggested that GECOM simply combine that information with the names from the National Register of Registrants (NRR) and the data from the Claims and Objections exercise. This would entail, said Alexander, using the bulk of the House-to-House data as verification, while the new registrants listed in that exercise would simply be added to the RLE.
ANUG and other small parties
Kaieteur News was informed that Ramkaran’s delegation, with which the Commission had a lengthy discussion, posed to GECOM that small parties deserved assistance from them to give them a fair and equitable standing in the upcoming elections.
Asked what assistance could be given to small parties by GECOM, Alexander said that some of them are yet to be properly briefed on what is required of a party, to participate in the electoral process. He added that GECOM can help to make them aware of what is needed.
Disproportionate Objections in Region 9
GECOM has received over 500 objections to registrants’ names being included on the list. What is daunting is that three-quarters of those objections originated from Region Nine, Gunraj told reporters yesterday that.
He said that over 200 originated from Lethem, while over 100 originated from Annai.
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