…still to sort out issues regarding printing of new ID cards

THE Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) Secretariat has put forward a proposal for a March 2020 holding of General and Regional elections given the list of activities required to facilitate a credible process.

“Basically we have been able to identify various periods, various activities and, to a large extent, come to some consensus on those times,” Commissioner Vincent Alexander told the media coming out of a statutory meeting on Friday.

“The [GECOM] Secretariat will do the adding up and bring back to us on Tuesday what that represents in terms of a timeline. The document which was before us, the proposition was March. But that document is under revision and so I would prefer not to be specific about a date. But, indeed, the document before us did say March.”

In a statement later Friday evening GECOM said the discussions which lasted in excess of four hours were centered on the durations in relation to each activity and will continue at the next Statutory Meeting on Tuesday, 10th September, 2019. “However, while those critical discussions are ongoing, the GECOM Secretariat continues to work on the encoding and verification process of the data garnered from the House-to-House Registration Exercise.”

In addition, GECOM said the Commission is moving swiftly with the training of polling day staff countrywide. “To date, training has been completed in Region 4 (Georgetown, East Bank and East Coast) and Region 5. Training will be conducted in Regions 1, 2 and 10 on the 7-8 September, 2019. The Guyana Elections Commission is committed to ensuring it produces a credible list for the conduct of credible General and Regional Elections within the shortest possible time in accordance with law.”

On the other hand, while People’s Progressive Party (PPP) nominated Commissioner Sase Gunraj agreed that the meeting was “a little bit more productive than last meetings held”, his colleagues Commissioner Bibi Shadick and Robeson Benn disagreed. “We’re no nearer to any date for elections,” Shadick stated, as she lamented that the meeting stretched on for some four hours.

She expressed that they are against the March 2020 proposal as it conflicts with their proposal for elections to be held by late November 2019. Asked what would push the timeline to March 2020, Alexander listed both statutory and administrative activities. “There are some things which are statutory. Those are not dates that we can make a determination on. How many days before we give people notice for them to prepare the Nomination List? How many days to publish the OLE? Those are statutory dates,” he explained.

Questioned further on his thoughts on the March timeline proposed, the Commissioner said that he had no “major contention” and that the probability of an election before the year’s end is “a hard call”.

“I have no major contention with those timelines but we, as I said, in a consensual mood were [on Friday] looking at the activities which are not statutory to see how they could be continued,” he said.

At the end of August, Chairperson of GECOM, Retired Justice, Claudette Singh had decided to merge the over 300,000 fresh registrants from the recently completed house-to-house registration exercise with the existing National Register of Registrants (NRR) database.
The exercise, previously scheduled to end on October 20, was cut short to August 31, 2019 after arguments from both government-nominated and opposition-nominated commissioners were heard by the Commission. It was explained that this reduction in time would also cater for an extended period of claims and objections.

Meanwhile, to successfully conduct the merge, the Commission has been soliciting information on how it could effectively carry out fingerprint cross matching and verification of the data at hand. On Friday, Alexander told the media that the Commission will be utilising the services of their old provider which is US-based firm. He stated: “The timeframe [to complete the crossmatching] we are looking at, subject to some clarification…is somewhere in the vicinity of 16 days.”

ID CARDS
On the matter of the printing of new national Identification (ID) Cards, the opposition-nominated Commissioners believe that this is unnecessary. “ID cards are not a necessity. It’s a form of identification, there are other forms of identification,” Commissioner Shadick argued. However, Commissioner Alexander expressed an opposing opinion that the printing of new ID cards, though a contentious matter, remains “a critical part of the exercise”.
Just recently, a probe was launched by GECOM and the Ministry of Citizenship into allegations of fake birth certificates being in the hands of scores of residents of Region Nine.

There have also been allegations of non-nationals being in possession of IDs without the relevant source documents. Though rumors of the same have been circulating for many years, actual discoveries were made by GECOM scrutineers during the ongoing house-to-house registration. Several persons have reportedly come out to say that these fake documents were provided to them by Region Nine’s Freedom House.

That aside, Commissioner Alexander said that the Commission is mulling internal production for new ID cards which would see the decommissioning of the current ID cards. “We are looking at internal production based on the procurement of equipment,” Alexander said. “In the interest of time, I could see us not necessarily producing all of the ID cards because the ID cards will come up from 14 [years of age] right up. In the interest of time I can see us producing in the first instance, 18 [years old] and beyond; about 400,000 [plus].”

He added that determining how long this process will take is dependent on the additional information to be provided by the Secretariat.