Latest update March 27th, 2026 12:40 AM
GECOM identified source of ballots mix-up in disciplined services voting – chief elections officer
(From right to left) members of GECOM; Public Relations Officer Yolanda Ward, Chief Elections Officer Vishnu Persaud, Deputy Chief Elections Officer Anneal Giddings, and Civic and voter education manager Nardeo Persaud.
Kaieteur News – The Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) has confirmed that a mix-up occurred with ballots cast by members of the disciplined services in Districts Four, Five, and 10.
The announcement was made by Chief Election Officer (CEO) Vishnu Persaud during a press conference held on Monday. He was accompanied by Public Relations Officer Yolanda Ward, Deputy Chief Elections Officer Aneal Giddings, and Civic and voter education manager Nardeo Persaud.
While providing an update on the Commission’s election preparations, Persaud revealed that during the sorting of ballots cast by the disciplined services, two extra ballots were discovered among those assigned to District Four.
Additionally, one ballot each was found missing from Districts Five and Ten. “One issue that emerged during the sorting of the disciplined services ballots – sorting means bringing the ballots cast by Discipline Forces to a point where we can dispatch them to predetermined polling stations to be intermixed and counted as ordinary ballots. In close to the end of that activity, we ran into a situation where we have two extra ballots in the set of ballots in district four, one short for district five and one short for District 10,” Persaud explained.
The CEO said that although the Commission has not definitively determined how the mix-up occurred, preliminary investigations suggest that ballots may have been mistakenly placed in envelopes designated for the wrong district. “Our interrogation of this matter has led us to a point where we have zoomed in on what could have caused this problem…We have looked at it from every possible angle and the only reasonable, logical conclusion that we came up with is that when that was done a district 5 and district 10 ballot was placed in a district four envelop,” Persaud noted.
To address the issue, Persaud stated that a memo containing recommendations and a methodology to rectify the situation has been prepared for submission to the Commission. However, he did not disclose its contents, as it has not yet been discussed by all commissioners. “The Commission will discuss this and decide whether they are approving the recommendations that we have made or not. It is only at that point that we will be able to give you a further update on this matter,” he said.
In response to media questions about how GECOM failed to reconcile the ballots across all ten districts as recorded in their spread sheet, Persaud clarified, “It’s not that we have not balanced. All of the ballots that went out came back. There is no dispute of any imbalance.”
He further explained what could have caused the mix up stating, “The disciplined services ballots go out in an envelope with the name, an ID number, an address of the elector. In that envelop is a smaller envelop labelled with the district in which that ballot is to be counted. The direction is given to the disciplined forces people of when you are done insert the ballot in the internal envelop that is labelled only with the district.”
However, according to Persaud, many of the returned ballots were found in the outer envelopes, which are marked with personal identifiers. “We cannot send that outer envelope to the polling stations to be used for intermixing. It compromises the secrecy of the ballot,” he explained. “By custom and practice, what we have been doing is to use an inner envelop that is labelled by district only to place the ballot in that envelop without compromising the secrecy of the ballot and then we put it in the bin that would hold envelopes containing ballots for that district,” Persaud stated.
The issue first came to public attention through a Facebook post by Alliance for Change (AFC) presidential candidate Nigel Hughes on Sunday. Hughes claimed that discrepancies emerged in the number of envelopes for Regions 4, 5, and 10. “Over the past 24 hours, discrepancies were detected in the number of envelopes for Regions 4, 5, and 10. The list of electors who voted and the number of envelopes differ,” Hughes stated. He alleged that in Region 4, there were two more envelopes than what was recorded in GECOM’s spread sheet, while Regions 5 and 10 each had one fewer.
Hughes called on GECOM to consult with experienced professionals to resolve the matter, emphasising the significance of even a single misdirected ballot.
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