CARICOM calls for new voters’ list

MAKING a case for electoral reform in Guyana, the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) Observation Team said, at a minimum, a new National Register of Registrant Database (NRRDB) should be generated.

“As a minimum condition of electoral reform, the Team recommends that the urgent need for the total re-registration of all voters in Guyana,” the three-member observer delegation recommended, while adding that “it is clear that given the state of the voter registration of the country that Guyana was not adequately prepared for the 2020 poll.”

Undoubtedly, Guyana went into the 2020 General and Regional Elections with a bloated List of Electors. Interestingly, the country has a population of 750,000 people, and the Official List of Electors is almost equal with well over 600,000 voters listed – among them the deceased and Guyanese who have long migrated. The records show, however, that approximately 460,000 persons went to the polls.

The A Partnership for National Unity + Alliance For Change (APNU+AFC) have long championed the cause for House-to-House Registration so as to pave way for the generation of a new NRRD but while the country-wide generation process was initiated in 2019, it was aborted by the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM), after the Court of Appeal, in February 2020, ruled that residency is not a requirement for voting in Guyana, thereby upholding the 2019 decision of the High Court to block the removal of persons from the NRRDB. The urgent need for elections to be held in Guyana in wake of the 2018-No Confidence Motion was also a contributing factor when the Chair of GECOM, Justice (Ret’d) Claudette Singh handed down her decision August 2019 decision to bring the registration process to an early halt.

CARICOM, while acknowledging that circumstances beyond the control of the Commission prevented greater preparedness, it said efforts should be made to address the issue of the “bloated list.” “It therefore behoves the Commission to create a new voter voter registry especially given the suspicion that the 2020 register was bloated, a suspicion which is not without merit,” CARICOM said.

Weighing in on the issue recently, well-known businessman and former MP, Stanley Ming said his biggest disappointment with the 2020 elections is that the said List of over 661,000 persons was used to take Guyana into the crucial elections. He believes that Guyana’s electoral system has been manipulated by various entities for years and such a List should not have been endorsed given the case.

“For you to have —- which is what they’re saying is going to come out of this election — a voter turnout and valid votes cast for the two major parties and the small parties of 440,000, it means that the people who were eligible to vote had to be 586,000. For you to have 586,000 people eligible to vote, you would have had to have a tabulation of 837,000 people because it’s only 70 per cent of the people are above the age of 18; the other 30 per cent are below,” he said while a guest on Benschop Radio 107.1 FM.

Ming’s position is that had political parties involved allowed for the completion of the house-to-house registration exercise, the current problems would have been significantly avoided. This opinion was shared by Attorney-at-Law, Nigel Hughes who was also on the programme. “As Stanley has said, the List is a major problem and there should have been full house-to-house registrations prior to elections because most people are of the firm view that the List that existed prior to elections was bloated,” Hughes said. In his view, the Court’s decision that migrants cannot been removed from the National Register of Registrants Data Base (NRDB), was not in the best interest of Guyana’s elections and Guyana was “begging for trouble” heading into the elections with such a List.