GECOM to verify new H2H registrants
Government-appointed Commissioner of GECOM, Vincent Alexander (Adrian Narine photo)
Government-appointed Commissioner of GECOM, Vincent Alexander (Adrian Narine photo)

…Alexander says process useless, urges steps to determine duplicates

THE Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM), over the next five days, will be conducting a field (house-to-house) verification of some 20,000 names of persons who were registered during the house-to-house registration exercise, which concluded in August this year.
The six commissioners of the elections commission were split evenly on the decision to conduct the exercise, but Chairperson of GECOM, Justice (Ret’d) Claudette Singh added her vote to move ahead with the process, which Government-appointed Commissioner, Vincent Alexander believes is “useless.”

PPP-appointed Commissioner of GECOM, Sase Gunraj (Adrian Narine photo)

“It was a majority decision that GECOM will do some field work on the new registrants… they will basically do a verification of the new registrants before they are committed to the voters’ list” said Commissioner Alexander in an invited comment, following GECOM’s statutory meeting, on Tuesday. Alexander said the process, while legal, is useless because the problem the commission is faced with, has to do with the question of duplicates and a verification will not in any way determine whether there are duplicates.

“Re-visiting people does not determine duplicates or otherwise. What is required are two acts. One act is the act of cross matching from the finger prints — there’s some difficulty with those. The other thing that is required for GECOM to do [is] side-by-side comparison between the existing National Register of Registrants, the house-to-house registration and the Claims and Objections to see if across those there are names which are duplicates that have not been identified by the biometric matching,” said Alexander in a comment on Monday.

He maintained this position on Tuesday, noting that when dealing with duplicates, there is a normal process which involves and investigative process which is followed by a hearing in some instances. “What we do with the remaining instances of duplicates, where there is a duplicate and we do not find anybody duplicating fraudulently, the more recent information supersedes the previous information,” said Alexander.

Despite his reservations about the process, the GECOM commissioner said there should be no slippage in time. He believes that whatever is done, in terms of the verification, has to take place within a specified timeframe. GECOM has since agreed that the process will run for five days and end on Sunday, December 22, 2019.

“During this process about 16,000 names will be exposed to the scrutiny and the verification that we were advocating for over the last week or so,” said Opposition-appointed GECOM Commissioner, Sase Gunraj. Initially, there were 37,000 possible new registrants who were identified after the conclusion of the house-to-house registration exercise and the fingerprint cross-matching.

According to Gunraj, following an internal process which was carried out by the secretariat, some 17,000 duplicates were identified. He said a further exercise, which ended on Tuesday, yielded over 4,000 new persons that already exist on the database. “So the 16,000 residue will now be subjected to the verification exercise, a scrutinised exercise by stakeholders and GECOM in the field,” said Gunraj.

The commissioner said the highest concentration of new registrants was found in Georgetown and on the East Coast of Demerara (ECD), while the other numbers were scattered throughout the registration offices across the country. “Some places have as little as double digits and most have triple digits and I believe those few offices had four digits,” said Gunraj.

When asked if five days were enough for the exercise, Gunraj said he was optimistic and believed it can be completed in time and will not affect the timeframe for the publication of the Revised List of Electors (RLE). On Monday, Alexander was reported as saying that there had been a gross misrepresentation of what verification meant and it was surprising that the very opposition, which withheld its scrutineers needed for the verification of the information during house-to-house visits, was now all in for verification.

“Unfortunately, the PPP boycotted the exercise and are now trying to get to do what they hadn’t done previously,” he said. GECOM has decided to post, for public scrutiny, the names of the new registrants at various GECOM offices. A photo has recently been circulating by the Opposition Leader which shows that former Chancellor of the Judiciary, Cecil Kennard, was listed as a new registrant which would form as a duplicate on the NRRDB. Alexander acknowledged that was a case of duplication which had to be resolved by a comparison between the NRRDB, the C&O information and the house-to-house data gathered.

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