POLOITICAL Scientist, Dr. David Hinds, said the unilateral decision taken by Chairman of the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM), Justice (Ret’d) Claudette Singh to prematurely end House-to-House Registration has the potential to disenfranchise Guyanese who are eligible to vote but have not been registered.

“I am puzzled by the abrupt termination of the House-to-House Registration as it could potentially disenfranchise those new voters who have not yet registered,” Dr. Hinds told Guyana Chronicle in an interview on Monday, hours after the decision was made.

In making the announcement, GECOM said after considerable deliberations at the level of the Commission on the pending General and Regional Elections, Justice Singh took a decision to stop House to House Registration with effect from August 31, and merge the data garnered from that registration exercise with the existing National Register of Registrants Database (NRRDB). In this regard, the Commission will move to an extensive Claims and Objections Exercise (C&O) before extracting the Preliminary List of Electors (PLE).

Dr. Hinds said from a first glance it would appear that the GECOM Chair is ‘marrying’ two aspects of Chief Justice (ag) Roxane George-Wiltshire’s August 14 ruling.

“By accepting the data from the House to House Registration she affirms its legality as ruled by the CJ. And by not throwing out the current data, she appears to be taking note of the part of the ruling that prohibits the removal of overseas voters from the list of registrants. In so doing, she has given the political sides part of what they want,” the political scientist reasoned.

He said, however, that it would also appear, at first glance, that the Opposition -– the People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C) got less, in that, it was hoping that the data from the House-to-House Registration would have been scrapped. Instead, more than 300,000 registrants would be added to the National Register as a result of the registration exercise.
However, he said the decision poses the risk of disenfranchising Guyanese. “I can’t think of any other mechanism to get them on the list. She should have at least granted them little bit more time to wrap up the registration exercise,” he told this newspaper.

According to Dr. Hinds, parts of Justice Singh’s decision could have future implications.
“The fact that the government has appealed the second part of the CJ’s ruling could further complicate this aspect of the GECOM’s chair decision. Does this approach minimise the chance for a credible list which the PPP fears? The big question is whether this hybrid approach is adequate enough to thwart the PPP’s effort to manipulate the tainted list,” the political scientist reasoned.

He, however said that critical questions must be answered before the period of the “extensive Claims and Objections exercise” commences. “How extensive would this exercise be in terms of the time that would be allotted? Would it consume the rest of the time that was allotted by GECOM for the House-to-House registration? The answer to these and other related questions would have to be clarified,” he told this newspaper.

“I am not sure that a short Claims and Objections exercise would allow for a surgical cleaning of the rest of the list that is not corrected by the HTH registration. So the issue has to be the length of time allowed for the Claims and Objections,” he added.

Nonetheless, Dr. Hinds said GECOM Chair’s decision to go this route may have been influenced by the acting Chief Justice’s recommendation to explore multiple ways of arriving at a credible list. “My initial reaction is that some of the names that should not be on the list could well slip through the cracks,” he said.