GECOM confirms around 2,000 first-time registrants

The Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) has managed a little more than 4,000 visits in its attempts to verify the new registrants from the House to House (HtH) exercise and confirmed around 2,000 as the other persons were not at home or could not be found.

While most Guyanese took to the streets for Christmas shopping, GECOM staff accompanied by scrutineers from the two parliamentary parties visited homes as part of a four-day field verification exercise.

Beginning on Thursday and ending tomorrow, the 16,300 supposedly new registrants recorded during the truncated national house-to-house registration exercise will receive visits to verify that they are indeed first-time registrants.

People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C) Chief Scrutineer Zulfikar Mustapha in an invited commented yesterday told Stabroek News that he is happy that the commission agreed to conduct the exercise and is hopeful that those who were not home can receive a second visit.

“On the first day they recorded just over 4,000 visits and just about 50% were found (and confirmed to be first-time registrants). Some were not at home and some could not be found,” he explained. Beginning on July 20 the commission had deployed a total of 1,056 teams of two from 261 cluster offices in various districts around the country in an attempt to operationalize the National Registration (Residents) Order 2019 which was signed by former GECOM Chairman James Patterson on June 11th, a week before the June 18th ruling of the CCJ, which deemed his appointment unconstitutional.

The Order provided for a registration process which would last from July 20, 2019 to October 20, 2019, however following a ruling by the Chief Justice that the exercise could not be used to create a new National Register of Registrants it was truncated by current GECOM Chair Claudette Singh.

Singh has however repeatedly maintained that since the CJ also ruled that the HtH process was legal it would be treated as a “verification” process and the information collected would be added to the NRR in keeping with the terms spelled out in the National Registration (Amendment) Act of 2005.

This act provides at Section 6 (1) that “it shall be lawful for the Commission by order with effect from a specific date to authorize the registration of all persons who are qualified to be electors; and all other persons in Guyana of the age of fourteen years and over, and such registration shall continue and be conducted in such manner and at such time as the Commission shall direct, suspending temporarily for periods prescribed by the Commission”.

Section 6 (6A) of the same Act also provides that the Elections Commission shall use the Official List of Electors from the 2001 General and Regional Elections as the base to commence continuous registration provided that at any stage the commission may undertake such verification as necessary by a means to be determined by the commission.

Speaking with Stabroek News yesterday, Singh explained that by drawing on the provisions of this Act the commission has decided that in the case of any duplicate registrations recorded during the HtH, “GECOM will use the latest information”.

In the case of the new registrants following the current verification exercise they will be added to the NRR.

According to Singh the commission had been hoping that the contracted employees to do same would’ve completed the fingerprint cross-matching exercise on the data collected during HtH before the completion of the Claims and Objections period but this did not happen.

“Only one part had come back and it was there [publicly displayed] during the C&O (claims and objections) and now the Opposition Leader has brought a compromise for us to use to verify the entire list and that is what is happening,” the Chair explained.

Opposition Leader Bharrat Jagdeo whose party had boycotted the originally HtH had argued that the data gathered during the process was “unverified” and likely padded.

He noted that while the fingerprint cross-matching returned 37,000 supposedly new registrants, an internal process at the commission found 17,000 of those to be duplicates. A further exercise last weekend yielded 4,000 more duplicates reducing the list of new registrants to just above 16,000.