Elections 2020 – Countrywide scrutiny for Revised List of Electors this week

The Secretariat of the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) has been cleared to combine all transactions for the finalisation and printing of the Revised List of Electors (RLE), and will disseminate the list for countrywide scrutiny this week.

On Sunday, Commissioner Vincent Alexander told the Guyana Chronicle that the commission met on the said day, and the day prior, so as to meet the tight deadlines set. “We should start printing today,” Alexander said.

“They have been given the permission to make all the entries; only today we finalised that. In other words, they have now permission to use all the information from the house-to-house [registration], from Claims and Objections [and the field verification process]. We have gone through all of the process to clear the data that can be used to compile the RLE,” he further explained.

The GECOM Secretariat is currently working to compile the information and the public will know, at a later date, the total number of electors on the revised list.

For many weeks, the commission grappled with issues related to duplicates from the cross-matching of the 370,000 transactions that were done during the house-to-house registration exercise.

The cross-matching was conducted by an international digital security company, Gemalto, but GECOM did its own checks and found some discrepancies.

The commission eventually voted for a team of scrutineers to work for five days to verify the existence of the 16,863 new registrants. Of the set, 10,329 registrants were confirmed while 6,534 were not.

While the matter has been a contentious one for the commission, it has now decided that while unconfirmed, the some 6,000 registrants will not be excluded from the List.

“Those 6,000 people will not be excluded from the list because they were properly registered,” Alexander said.

“We went through all of the duplicates and consensually decided how we will deal with each one of them. That was not a problem, but that took time,” he added.

The list will come under review before the final list – the Official List of Electors (OLE) – is compiled for use in the coming elections. Alexander said that the RLE will be in the public domain for 20 days or more.

Any inaccuracies observed can be communicated to the commission and the Chief Elections Officer, (CEO) Keith Lowenfield.

Once that review period comes to an end, the CEO is then expected to certify the RLE and produce from it the OLE.

“We are on a tight deadline, but so far we’re still on track for March 2nd,” Alexander told this newspaper.

On Friday, Director-General of the Ministry of the Presidency, Joseph Harmon, said that the commission had given the government the assurance that it would work to ensure the RLE would be made available by December 29, 2019.

He had stressed that the production of a credible list must see due diligence being given to the data acquired from the House-to-House registration process.

President David Granger has expressed his satisfaction with the commission’s report that it is still on track for the March 2, 2020 elections.

“The government side is satisfied that Guyana is on stream to have efficient and credible elections on the 2nd of March, 2020,” the Head of State said.

“We are satisfied with the work that is taking place now and we feel that the Chairman of the Commission has got her finger on the pulse and will do everything in her ability to ensure that we will have credible elections on the 2nd of March next year,” he further stated.

With the assurance that elections are on schedule, on Friday, President Granger also issued the proclamation for dissolution of Parliament and the 10 Regional Democratic Councils today, which will pave the way for the General and Regional Elections.