By Jarryl Bryan
With the completion of Claims and Objections, it is possible that the Revised List of Electors (RLE) that will largely determine who can vote in the upcoming General and Regional Elections could be ready by next month or early in January.
This is according to the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) Public Relations Officer Yolanda Ward, who was asked if an RLE could be completed before January considering GECOM’s processes.
“It’s possible. I would say by late December, very early January (2020), it should be completed,” Ward said, going on to explain that the data from the Claims and Objections has to go through much the same process as was followed for encoding.
“It goes through the same procedure in terms of the encoding verification. And of course, that information, you would have to then have it cross-matched. So, the process is no different than what obtained in any other registration exercise. It has to be completed, encoded, go through the process, fingerprint cross-match.”
Ward noted that from this process, GECOM would be able to generate an RLE and then an Official List of Electors, with elections due in March 2020. She also noted that the second batch of data from the House-To-House registration exercise that was sent overseas has been received.
What GECOM will eventually do with this data is still unclear, as a statutory meeting last week had ended with Opposition-nominated Commissioner Sase Gunraj revealing that they could not reach consensus on the usage of the House-to-House data – a process which was halted since August 31.
“It was a marathon meeting. We had a lot to discuss. We’re actually talking about the interrogation of the House-to-House data at this point. Our discussions currently, as long winded as they were, are still incomplete. There is nothing definitive that we give at this point,” Gunraj had said.
When asked at the conclusion of the meeting about the same House-to-House data garnered, Government-nominated Commissioner Vincent Alexander also noted, “That matter is still to be finalised.”
Opposition Leader Bharrat Jagdeo met with the GECOM Chairperson on Tuesday last and issues regarding this data were discussed. Apart from this, the Commissioner told media operatives that many of the matters discussed ended in an inconclusive outcome.
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 not invited to participate.
This, together with the nature in which the exercise started under the backdated order of the former Chairman, Retired Justice James Patterson and the fact that many people boycotted the exercise, has not helped arguments for the data to be merged with the National Register of Registrants (NRR).
In fact, the parliamentary Opposition has long contended that merging the data would corrupt the entire database, citing the manner in which the data was collected. On the other hand, the Government-nominated Commissioners on GECOM have advocated for the inclusion of the data.
A decision was taken recently by GECOM to post the H2H data at its registration offices for persons to inspect and then use as a reference to make changes to the Preliminary List of Electors (PLE). At the time, the Opposition was opposed to this decision since the H2H data was likely to be inaccurate.
