A maddening, bloated voters’ list

Feb 02, 2020 Features / Columnists, My Column

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The elections are a month away. The Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) is putting out a Final Voters’ List that would be severely bloated. There will be the names of dead people, many of whom would have died since 2001.
I know at least five people whose names are on that list who have since died. Four of them are my relatives and the other was my friend, Dr. Frank Beckles. In fact, I know many more, when I stop to recall my other friends who have died over the past three years.
This bloated list has come about because the High Court has ruled that no name should be extracted from the list unless someone produces a death certificate.
About six thousand Guyanese die each year, the majority from natural causes. The others died on the roads, were murdered, or died by misadventure such as a mining pit caving in or drowning.
When I first spoke about the list in the run-up to the local government elections, I was told that there is no natural liaison between GECOM and the office of the Registrar General. I had expected that once a death certificate was provided, then naturally, the information would have been forwarded to GECOM. This is not the case.
There was a period of claims and objections, but the scrutineers missed so many names that I wonder whether the exercise was worth the time and the money.
I understand that the list stands at over six hundred thousand. That is about 88 percent of the population of voters, an impossibility when one considers the demographics. For starters, about 66 percent of the population is below the age of 35.
Then we have those who are below the age of eighteen, a significant portion of that Under-35 population. Senior citizens make up about twenty percent of the population.
There has been migration. Over the past two decades, more than 100,000 people have left the country legally for North America. Indeed, many of these can return to vote, but most wouldn’t, either because they simply cannot afford to or because they cannot be granted leave from their place of employment.
When the votes are counted, I doubt whether the numbers would be higher than 375,000, about 55 percent of the number on the voters’ list.
Of course, there was supposed to be continuous registration that would have made the list as clean as possible. GECOM did find cases of multiple registrations by an individual, but nothing happened. Today, some people have as many as three identification cards, with different variations of their names.
There are those who got married, so on the list they would be recorded with their maiden names as well as their matrimonial names.
Some would have regularised their status. But many would not have taken the time to do so. That might explain the large number of identification cards still in the possession of GECOM.
The house-to-house registration would have put paid to many irregularities, but from the start, the political opposition was opposed to this exercise. In the end, some 300,000 persons were re-registered. Then came the problem with having the newly registered added to the list. Among them would have been people who would have changed addresses.
To its credit, GECOM did manage to find the duplications, but that was not enough. The result is that this promises to be the most confusing of elections.
There are those who believe that the ink used at the places of poll is really indelible. Enterprising people have been known to remove the ink from their fingers. And these people do not worry about the criminal consequences of being caught voting more than once.
I have seen the campaigns and I have seen the social media posts. Strangely, no one has commented on the size of the list and the potential for voter fraud. There are reports of people being paid to commit voter fraud.
And outside of the polling booths, there have been other attempts at fraud. For the past few elections, there have been frauds inside GECOM. After the 1997 elections, it was transpired that the statements of poll signed by the various polling agents were replaced by other unsigned statements.
This came out in court and in the end, the elections were vitiated.
After the 2015 elections, there were attempts to smuggle fake statements of poll into GECOM. Officials know who attempted to smuggle in the fake statements of poll, but to this day, they have not disclosed the name of the individual.
There were recounts of some ballot boxes, as though the people who manned them could not count a few slips of paper sitting together in a group and sharing the information on each ballot.
When the final results were declared, the Chairman of the commission was accused of rigging the elections. I would never understand how he could, when people representing all the political parties were there for the final count.
He chose to demit office. The people who campaigned against him have since moved to the courts, but that matter is still pending.
I remember the diplomats representing the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and the European Union, all asked that modifications be made to the electoral process. One of them said that the new government might feel that five years is a long time. There have been no modifications and the five years have all but passed.
The idea was that the count from the polling places would have been declared as they come in. That would have provided for a speedy declaration of the results and would have negated any post-election tampering.
This time around, it is back to the same thing.
To its credit, GECOM did disengage the main computer from online, because there were reports of people breaking into it in elections past and tampering with the figures. By removing the computer, GECOM actually safeguarded itself, but incurred the ire of some people.
That computer remains offline but the myriad problems remain, not least among them the maddening, bloated voters’ list.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

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