42 days for claims and objections
Government-appointed GECOM Commissioner, Vincent Alexander
Government-appointed GECOM Commissioner, Vincent Alexander

…GECOM extends timeframe in keeping with elections date
-PPP objects, commission to meet again on Friday

THE Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) has set a 42-day timeline for the conducting of claims and objections, as opposed to the 35-day period which the commission had recently agreed to.

Government-appointed GECOM Commissioner, Vincent Alexander, said the decision to extend the period was taken after President David Granger announced that General and Regional Elections will be held on March 02, 2020.

“We had said it will run for 35 days at the time when the projected elections date was in the sense of February… with the President having announced elections for March 2, we have now adjusted the period for claims and objections,” said Alexander in an invited comment following GECOM’s statutory meeting on Tuesday.

Alexander said the GECOM secretariat advisably extended the period after recognising that there was more time to conduct claims and objections. The extension, he said, does not interfere with the overall framework of GECOM.

The claims and objections period, which started on Tuesday, allows persons, who will become 18 years old by the end of October this year, to be registered. Individuals who have had changes in their particulars, including addresses and names can also utilise the period to make the necessary adjustments.

According to Alexander, now that the time period has been extended, persons will have more time to get their name on the Official List of Electors (OLE).
Although Alexander believes there are added benefits because of the extension, opposition-appointed GECOM commissioners disagreed with the commission’s decision.
Opposition-appointed GECOM Commissioner, Robeson Benn, said he had initially objected to 35 days, noting that his first option was 28 days, but now that it has been extended further, he is in total disagreement.

“We had a great disagreement and it came to a vote… I do not accept the 42 days period,” Benn lamented. Another opposition-appointed GECOM Commissioner, Bibi Shadick, also said that she does not support the decision to extend the period to 42 days.
“I do not agree with it… there is no next step because if the chairman signs an order and she refuses to revisit it then we cannot do anything,” said Shadick. Despite disagreeing on the extension, the commissioner said they agreed with GECOM’s decision to have the claims and objections offices opened all day as opposed to just in the afternoons. In addition, in order to ensure the process is more efficient, GECOM will be setting up 41 sub offices across the country.

In addition to matters related to claims and objections, the commission continued discussions on how the data garnered from the house-to-house registration exercise should be used.

“We are still considering the specific use of house-to-house data,” said Alexander, adding that the discussions will continue on Friday. GECOM’s Public Relations Officer, Yolanda Warde, had said that the commission was conducting the encoding and verification process of the merger of data from the house-to-house registration exercise with the National Register of Registrants, which will ultimately lead to the extraction of the Preliminary List of Electors (PLE).

“That Preliminary List of Electors [PLE] will move us straight into a claims and objections exercise. So, we cannot immediately run into the claims and objections exercise, because we are still going through that process of the merger,” she told the Department of Public Information (DPI).

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