With the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) having published the list of persons registered during the House-to-House exercise this year, it turns out that the list is littered with mistakes and duplicate names that also appear on the Preliminary List of Electors (PLE).
This is according to the People’s Progressive Party (PPP), which on Tuesday was also critical of the information coming out of GECOM. The party took issue with GECOM urging Guyanese to check their names on the H2H list.
“GECOM is essentially telling 300,000-plus Guyanese to visit the GECOM offices. Many of these persons have already checked their names on the Preliminary List of Electors (PLE) and are now being told to return to verify their particulars,” the party said.
According to the party, the registrants’ list having many errors confirms the suspicions the PPP and its Commissioners have been expressing from the start. The party noted that it made checks and did its own investigations and made some startling discoveries.
“There are thousands of names duplicated on the Preliminary List of Electors (PLE) and thousands of persons who are under the voting age of 18. Our investigations would have found too, that dozens of persons listed as new registrants cannot be found at the addresses listed and this is a serious cause for concern – fuelling the worry that there are many non-existent persons on the list published by GECOM.”
Further, the party noted that the House-to-House registrants’ list is not a supplementary list to the PLE and cannot be used during a Claims and Objections exercise. “There is no provision in the laws of Guyana to authorise the publication of a duplicate list that does not originate from the National Register of Registrants Database.”
According to the PPP, the H2H Registration process was flawed from the beginning and any attempt to merge the data from that process with the National Register of Registrants (NRR) can compromise the entire database.
The PPP called on GECOM to immediately withdraw the House-to-House registrants’ list and continue with the ongoing Claims and Objections exercise.
When H2H started this year, it was without the input of the Opposition. In fact, the only party that scrutinised the enumerators during the exercise was the ruling party, as the PPP was reportedly not even invited to participate.
This, together with the surreptitious nature in which the exercise started under the backdated order of the former Chairman, James Patterson, and the fact that many people boycotted the exercise, has fuelled suspicion from the Opposition about GECOM’s insistence on using the data.
Verification
Earlier on Tuesday it was announced that GECOM, which is in the process of wrapping up its Claims and Objections (C&O) exercise, has done a total of 17,243 transactions including almost 4000 new registrants.
This information was released by GECOM’s Public Relations Officer, Yolanda Ward, on Tuesday. She had also explained that 9516 transfers of voters, from one area to the other, were done during the exercise.
There were also 1627 replacements, 472 photo retakes and 32 objections during the Claims and Objections. GECOM, according to Ward, has also registered 3924 new voters during the Claims and Objections period.
A Claims and Objections period is for persons seeking to make a claim to be included on the voters’ list. They can also use the exercise to make objections to their information on the Preliminary List of Electors, such as to change their address.
The exercise started on October 1 and has seen multiple registration areas set up to cater to voters in all 10 administrative regions. It is also understood that the claims part of the process will end on November 4, while objections can be submitted up to November 11.
However, GECOM’s decision to publish the House-to-House list of registrants has been criticised by the political Opposition from the moment it was announced. They have noted that not only does the law not cater to the list being published, but it also contains duplicate registrants.
A formal letter was even dispatched by the party’s chief scrutineer, Zulficar Mustapha, to Chief Elections Officer Keith Lowenfield, urging GECOM to halt the exercise.
