—-proof to be collected on deceased, migrants

THE Guyana Elections Commission is still deliberating on how it will deal with ballot papers which do not have the required six-digit stamp and claims of voting in the place of migrants and the deceased.

On Monday, GECOM Public Relations Officer (PRO), Yolanda Ward, told the media that there were three categories of unstamped ballots found during the recount process thus far.
These include: unstamped ballots at stations where there was the intermixing of disciplined service ballots; stamps on one half of the ballot; and no stamps on either halves of the ballot.

Speaking to the category whereby there were stamps only on one half of the ballot, Ward said that this varied from stamps being placed on the General Elections or Regional Elections section of the ballot. “The commission will continue to monitor this situation and, of course, will have to investigate to make a determination as to how to move forward with this,” she noted, adding: “For those of you who may not be aware, the legal practice, or what is in the law — the Representation of the People Act— is that a ballot that is not stamped is not valid.”

She said that while the commission will continue its deliberation on the issue to arrive at a conclusive decision, such legal requirements are also being examined. Commissioner Vincent Alexander also confirmed on Monday that some ballot boxes were found to have ballots which were all stamped only for the General Elections. In such cases, GECOM is considering that where the number of Regional ballots in the ballot box match the number of General ballots, the validity of the unstamped ballots can be realised.

“There is the emerging view that, given the function of the stamp on the ballots, that those ballots be allowed in because they are a part of a document that was stamped,” he said. However, further discussions must be had in cases where such parallelism is not realised.
There is also some indication that ballots unstamped on one half may have originated from the intermixing of ballots cast by the disciplined services.

Alexander stated: “What we want to do is to do a kind of a check to see if there is correspondence between the number disciplined services that were intermixed at a particular place and the number of ballots not stamped and that will then tell us whether it is likely or more than likely that it is those ballots which were not stamped.”

THE DECEASED AND MIGRANTS
Meanwhile, on the issue of death and migration anomalies, the Elections Commission requests that the evidence be provided and attached to the Observation Report. However, the commission is yet to come to a final decision on how it will act on proof provided.

Commissioner Alexander says that the National Registration Act provides for the Chief Immigration Officer to send to GECOM reports on migration which can aid GECOM in this regard. However, being that this section of the Act has not been adhered to for some time, he said that GECOM has the right at this time to request the information and match it against the allegations. On the matter of deaths, he said that the General Registrar Office (GRO) periodically sends a list of the registered dead to the commission and the commission should be able to extract such names from its List of Electors although there may be some challenge regarding the effectiveness of the GRO’s record keeping.

Alexander said he has long advocated for a new National Registrar of Registrants which would have come through the completion of the house-to-house registration exercise and could have eliminated the current challenges. However, the opposition pushed for the house-to-house registration to be halted, in the interest of elections being held soonest, resulting a bloated Official List of Electors (OLE).

“Prior to the no-confidence motion (NCM), everybody agreed that we should have a new National Registrar of Registrants. The Parliament voted the monies for a new National Registrar of Registrants. The argument against it was very situational after the NCM…we are now sitting on problems, some of which may have been dealt with had we not proceeded to use a bloated list,” Alexander said.

Already, the APNU+AFC has provided the commission with some proof to their claims of deceased and migrant voters although opposition counters this by claiming that no poof has been provided. On Monday, Commissioner Sase Gunraj disagreed with Alexander that the commission can investigate the said anomalies. “The commission is not tasked with the authority to deal with or investigate those issues. So, it’s one thing to have no evidence presented but then, like I said, it’s not necessary because the commission does not have the authority to deal with that,” he told the media, adding that the court is authorised to deal with such.