We need a more efficient system to work with

Jan 08, 2020 Letters

DEAR EDITOR,

As our clock ticks away towards the March 2nd general elections, Guyanese should be paying very keen attention to what I regard as confusion over the voters’ list. In recent weeks, GECOM has announced that the so called Revised Voters’ List contains an astonishing 671,000 out of population which is officially listed at 750,000. This simply cannot be even if we deploy the most creative and dishonest forms of calculation.
Far as I know, Guyana’s schools population of students under age 18 is listed at about 260,000. Therefore, if you subtract this number from 750,000, the revised list cannot be anywhere 671,000.
Editor, this situation could represent what people around the world refer to as the perfect storm for controversy and political unrest. I have read letters and commentaries from people in both the dailies and in social media platforms, blaming last year’s ruling by the Chief Justice that qualified people cannot be removed from the list.
How GECOM will manage this looming level of confusion in the coming days as the date nears and as the political tension rises, is beyond me. I do fear some level of confusion on elections day.
Going forward, I look forward to the day when the major parties, in and out of parliament, will sit down like knights at the roundtable, and clean up this sordidly confusing and overly bureaucratic electoral system of ours. We sit in front of our television sets and watch as results from places on the globe with far larger populations being announced within hours of an election. Ours is fraught with objections from parties, recounts and disputations of the statements of polls. We simply have to find a more efficient system to work with.
Also, we do not hear of the political strife that accompanies preparations for general elections in other places as is the case here with our electoral scroll. I am dearly hoping that the system is revised in the near future so it could make more sense to ordinary Guyanese. I look forward to the publication of the final voters’ list and the numbers on that list therein.

Peter Joseph

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