GECOM Chair assures elections will be credible

Amid concerns about some activities currently being conducted by the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM), Chairperson, Retired Justice Claudette Singh on Friday reiterated that she will not allow any misdemeanour to take place.
“I will not sell my integrity for all the oil in Guyana,” she told reporters as she arrived at the Umana Yana for Nominations Day.
“Only one way I know and that is the correct way,” Justice Singh posited.
Opposition Leader Bharrat Jagdeo had on Thursday expressed concerns over the inclusion of unverified persons on the Revised List of Electors (RLE).
Initially, some 20,000 persons were listed as new registrants from the now-scrapped House-to-House Registration.
The parliamentary Opposition had, however, found that these “new registrants” included duplicates, persons who were already registered, or in some cases, dead.
After some double-checking, it was found at 16,000 persons were actually “new registrants”.
Following pressure from the Opposition-nominated Commissioners, GECOM staff had embarked on a field verification activity before including the 16,000 persons, that were registered, on the List of Electors.
From that exercise, 10,000 persons were verified, leaving 6000 unverified. GECOM, despite protest from the Opposition, decided to include those persons on the RLE – a move which was not approved by the People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C).
But the GECOM boss defended the move. She told reporters on Friday that “there was no evidence that those people were not registered…We needed that evidence and if that evidence were to surface tomorrow, we will deal with it”.
Responding to the GECOM Chairperson’s assertions, Jagdeo on Friday argued: “that is not true.”
He told media operatives that he can name at least four names and corresponding addresses. “If you go there you will not find a single house there. So, we have the evidence and it was shared at GECOM.”
“If you are going to go on [a] verification exercise to verify 16,000 names, your own staff says ‘we have only been able to verify 10,000’, it means the other 6000 remain unverified,” Jagdeo contended.
Moreover, he reiterated concerns regarding changes GECOM is making to the National Register of Registrants (NRR).
“This surreptitious access to the NRR to start altering people’s particulars, addresses, names, etc, using the unverified database, that too is a dangerous thing,” he said.
GECOM had explained that it is updating persons’ names and addresses based on information received from the House-to-House Registration exercise.
Jagdeo said the international community has already been informed of these concerns.
The Opposition has long contended that the House-to-House exercise was largely unsupervised and would produce flawed results.