Jagdeo proposes joint approach to verify 60,000 new registrants

General Secretary of the People’s Progressive Party/ Civic (PPP/C), Bharrat Jagdeo, is recommending that an effective and cooperative approach be taken to verify the unusually high count of 60,000 new registrants identified following the truncated House-to-House registration exercise.
During his weekly press briefing, the Opposition Leader recounted the striking disparities observed by the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) in the cross- matched data returned from Germalto, an international digital security.
The Secretariat, which conducted their own assessments of the cross-matching, discovered that 17,000 of those supposedly new registrants were already on the National Register of Registrants Database (NRRDB).

Opposition GECOM Commissioner Sase Gunraj revealed that he was unclear whether there was an error on the part of Germalto. Nonetheless, GECOM has reached out to the digital security company enquiring about the disproportionate figures.

At his Church Street office, yesterday Jagdeo stated that as a result of this “confusion” the elections commission now has to manually cross-match and cross off data from the Preliminary List of Elections (PLE) and data from the house-to-house.
He added that crossing out the names that are not present on both lists will arrive at the actual number of new registrants.

“I already said that they shouldn’t use the data at all, because it was never tested. But if they do discover a number of new registrants there… then we are prepared to accept them, provided that after that they cleanse the list and they come up this new subset of registrants. We can have a joint exercise with all the political parties and GECOM to verify their existence as new people,” the Opposition Leader explained.

He continued, that he is very pleased with the level of scrutiny the house-to house data is getting and that the elections commission is paying attention to this. “We see movement in that direction, so we are hopeful,” Jagdeo said.

Aside from the issue of house-to-house data, the former President went on to note that the GECOM’s activities fit well into their stipulated timeline. He added that initially his party believed that the National and Regional Elections could have been held by January, the latest. However, considering that elections were delayed until March 02, Jagdeo said that “they [GECOM] do have a lot of room.”