The GECOM of today is not prepared to violate the constitution of Guyana

Sep 23, 2022 Letters

Dear Editor,

Again, I ask the question, this time more directly to Mr. Sherwood Lowe, Executive member of the APNU who sought to take me to task in his letter of September ‘22 to KN.

Has Mr. Lowe conveniently forgotten that it is the same list that he and his party complains so ashamedly about being ‘bloated’ that gave his now rickety coalition combined majorities in the National Assembly of the 9th and 10th parliament respectively?

Perhaps just as 32 was erroneously deemed the greater number in a parliament of 65, in the same way, it seems that the 200,000 ‘impersonators’ who the APNU+AFC bellyaches about, conveniently switched their allegiance from PPP/C to APNU+AFC in the 2011 and 2015 elections.

The APNU+AFC should stop shedding crocodile tears over their much vaunted claim about a bloated list. What is even more ridiculous is the assertion by the most senior member of the opposition-sponsored GECOM commissioners, who claimed that the opposition’s headache about ‘voter impersonation’ and ‘bloated lists’ started with the introduction of cycles of continuous registration. It is as if they do not want persons who are qualified to be registered nor to have names to be extracted from the NRRDB to be published in the Official List of Electors until they achieve their demand.

The APNU+AFC is unsupportive of cycles of continuous registration because in their view, that exercise albeit constitutionally correct, should be deleting, not only adding names of persons who are legally registered and included in GECOM’s National Register of Registrants Data Base (NRRDB).

Their topsy-turvy reasoning is, that by doing so, the list is becoming more and more bloated thus compounding APNU+AFC’s elections dilemma.

The opposition wants GECOM to act unconstitutionally by removing from the NRRDB persons who are legally qualified to vote.

They know fully well that during the claims and objections period as well as through the provision of names of deceased persons recorded at the General Register Office (GRO) and sent on a regular basis to GECOM that such names can be legally deleted from the NRRDB.

The APNU+AFC is exerting every effort to frustrate GECOM’s efforts to realise a successful Local Government Election. The parliamentary opposition wants fresh house-to-house registration to be done every five years before an election, in addition, they want the NRRDB scrapped and replaced by a new data base arising from each house to house exercise.

What the APNU+AFC wants GECOM to do will not happen. The GECOM of today is not prepared to violate the constitution of Guyana as the APNU+AFC did during their sojourn in government, the most blatant being the appointment of a chairman for GECOM in violation of the constitution, not to mention persistent issuing of instructions to and interference in constitutional bodies.

Demands by the APNU+AFC for GECOM to investigate alleged ‘voter impersonation’ is nothing but an attempt to regain their sagging credibility, to throw a spanner in GECOM’s work plan for Local Government Election and a smokescreen to obfuscate their efforts to frustrate, once again, the democratic process which they themselves tried to derail during the March to August 2020 period.

Yours faithfully,
Clement J. Rohee

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