GECOM agrees to field exercise to verify 16,000 new registrants

Dec 18, 2019 News

The Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) in a majority decision agreed to conduct a house-to-house verification of new registrants that which number to approximately 16000 persons. PPP-nominated Commissioner, Sase Gunraj, told the press outside GECOM’s head office that the verification of the data will be conducted within the next five days.

GECOM Commissioner Sase Gunraj

The exercise will kick off tomorrow and end on Sunday.
He expressed confidence that the activity will not affect GECOM work programme schedule.
It is not likely to affect the schedule Gunraj said of the exercise which would include field verification, public advertisements, and participation of “stakeholders”.
“Our hope is that the GECOM staffers will pursue this exercise with the type of diligence that it requires to provide satisfaction to the electorate, to the public and all those concerned who have an interest in our having free, fair, transparent and peaceful elections,” he said.
He explained that there has been a list of 20,000 unverified new registrants.
Of the 20,000, Gunraj noted that about 4,020 of the persons were duplicates on the preliminary list of electors. That brought the list of new registrants to 16,000.
Government Commission, Vincent Alexander, expressed his disappointment at the decision, calling the verification process would be “useless”.
He told reporters that there is no need for the verification exercise.
“As far as I am concerned, nothing else is to be done because those duplicates could have been investigated and hearings conducted.“
It got to the point where we have done an internal side-by-side comparison of the information… Field exercise has nothing to do with duplicates,” Alexander said.
He noted, “It’s a decision GECOM could have made but I wouldn’t say it is illegal; it is useless,” he added.
Last month, GECOM launched a verification exercise after it noticed striking disparities in the cross-matched data that has returned from the overseas supplier.
Gemalto, an international digital security company, was contracted by GECOM to cross-match the house-to-house data.
Both tranches of data have returned and they appear to indicate that there are about 60,000 total new registrants. This unusually high figure prompted the Secretariat to conduct its own assessment of the cross-matched data.
Gunraj told the media that Chief Elections Officer (CEO), Keith Lowenfield, indicated to the Commission that the Secretariat has found some of those supposedly new registrants already on the National Register of Registrants Database (NRRDB).
GECOM has decided that it will reach out to Gemalto in the hope that the company provides answers.
Gunraj said that this matter places even more doubt on the use and integrity of the house-to-house data, which he has questioned for some time. GECOM still has not decided how it will go about merging the house-to-house data with the preliminary list, and the data gathered during Claims and Objections.
Commissioner Vincent Alexander had told reporters that GECOM will also have to do its own further investigation of the names on the preliminary list which the cross-matched data has pegged as “new” registrants.
Otherwise, GECOM is also contending with the fact that a very small portion of unverified registrants have come forward to claim their identities.
Alexander said, too, that of about 18,000 persons whose names were published in the daily newspapers, approximately 300 have uplifted their ID cards.

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