The bloated list began under PPP/C

Nov 09, 2019 Letters

Dear Editor,

In his article ‘Showdown seems to be looming over voters list and use of id cards:’ (KN: 07/11/2019), Mr. Clement Rohee made quite misleading references to me to which I need to respond. I could associate myself with his contention that any electoral list deemed unacceptable by opposition parties is unlikely to lead to free and fair elections but I need to add that the list must be acceptable to all parties particularly the major ones.
Also, in the current situation where the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) is largely the constitutional agent of the two larger parties this position, which speaks directly of the parties, is muted for, with very few exceptions, in any binding arbitration/adjudication whether or not the parties believe that the court decisions are just, they must adhere to them.
With this as a background, Mr. Rohee stated that “Henry Jeffrey is wrong to link unclaimed ID cards to multiple voting.”
Jeffrey did not link ID cards with multiple voting; he linked a bloated list with multiple voting and it is Rohee that alarmingly failed to grasp my position. So let me briefly restate it for the public he may have unwittingly misled.
I claimed that in dealing with social issues, delivering justice has been my major concern. GECOM believes that the elections list is bloated and over 25,000 persons need to be removed from it.
How GECOM came to that conclusion or intends to solve it is not my concern, but as Mr. Rohee said, free and fair elections depend upon a clean list acceptable to the parties, and as such the bloat should be removed.
Indeed, it could have and should have long been removed but instead was left to grow under the PPP/C regime. Now, placed in a position by the Caribbean Court of Justice and GECOM to deal with this clearly unacceptable situation, the PPP/C is using its parliamentary position to maintain the status quo.
This suggests that it benefitted from the development and maintenance of a condition that could and possibly did lead to electoral fraud that diminished the constitutional rights of all Guyanese. Justice demands that GECOM deprive the PPP/C of any opportunity to benefit from this insidious position. If it loses the 2020 elections and takes to the courts, the ‘clean hands doctrine’ is also likely to lose.
Mr. Rohee also said that Jeffrey ‘asserts that the PPP is opposing the matter with ‘unclean hands’ yet he fails to point to those of the APNU+AFC which began to decay and rot since December 2018.’
Again Mr. Rohee fails to grasp what is clearly before him. Jeffrey did not say that the PPP is opposing the matter with ‘unclean hands’; what I said is that if the PPP lose the coming elections and approach the courts, its behaviour will most likely lead to its losing the case based upon the clean hands doctrine.
I did also suggest that the events of December 2019 may have been an effort of the PPP/C to maintain the bloated status quo and as such that event should be viewed as merely an aspect of a PPP/C plan that has gone badly wrong.
In this context it would appear that the decay and rot of which Mr. Rohee spoke began long ago under the PPP regime and has little to do with APNU+AFC.
Also, let me make it clear that whether or not the PPP/C actually benefitted, the bloat began under its watch. It may have benefitted from it; it failed to dismantle it and even when this clearly unacceptable situation was brought to its attention by GECOM, the body it established, it refused to participate in its removal! I believe that this is enough to leave sufficient doubt in the mind of any objective observer as to the cleanliness of the hands of the PPP/C in this matter.
Henry B Jeffrey

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