6,535 unverified registrants can have undue influence on elections outcome — Nandlall

People‘s Progressive Party, (PPP) Executive Member and Attorney -at- law, Anil Nandlall, believes that the inclusion of 6,535 unverified new registrants on the Revised List of Electors,(RLE) can have undue influence on the outcome of the elections.

Nandlall‘s comments comes days after Guyana Election Commission, (GECOM) announced there are 661,378 eligible voters whose names will be published in the Revised List of Electors (RLE) on Monday for public vetting.
In a social media post, the PPP member raised his objections about the decision.

He reasoned that given the party’s position as well as GECOM‘s decision to verify the names of 16,863 “possible new registrants” emerging from the truncated house-to-house registration exercise, the decision to still include the names on the RLE is a matter of grave concern.
“Significantly, only 118 of this list of 16,863 new registrants were not visited. After going through with this entire verification ordeal, GECOM still ends up placing all the 16,863 on the RLE, including persons which GECOM itself has confirmed they could not find and the 118 who were not even visited,” he said.

Nandlall noted, therefore, that the Commission ‘s move to have those names included on the RLE of 661,378 eligible voters can eventually form the Official List of Electors, (OLE) and impact the outcome of the regional and general elections slated for March 2.
He reasoned, “Coincidentally, those 6,535 votes will constitute over one seat– the difference between APNU & the PPP at the 2015 elections.”

The comments follow an announcement by GECOM’s Public Relations Officer, Yolanda Ward, that the RLE will be posted for 21 days for public scrutiny and corrections to be made to any erroneous information.
“Where changes were not made, persons should visit the registration office in their area with the ‘pink slip’ from 4th January to inform and update accordingly,” Ward stated.

Following the conclusion of the 21 days, GECOM will embark on preparing the Official List of Electors for the March 2, 2020 elections.
Last week, GECOM in a majority decision agreed to conduct a house-to-house verification of new registrants, which number approximately 16,000 persons. The verification of the data was conducted over the next five days.
Following the exercise, Ward disclosed that 6,534 of the purported new registrants from the truncated House-to-House exercise have not been confirmed.

Ward informed reporters that the Commission had resolved to subject the data to a short verification exercise, since the House-to-House exercise came under dispute by the political opposition.
During that exercise, GECOM field staffers were accompanied by People’s Progressive Party (PPP) scrutineers.
The verification exercise took off after it was noted that there were striking disparities in the cross-matched data that had 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 were returned and they appeared 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. Of a list of 20,000 unverified new registrants, 4,020 of the persons were duplicates on the preliminary list of electors. That brought the list of new registrants to about 16,000.