…Stanley Ming casts doubts on voter turnout

“A list of 660,000 from a population of 750,000 is a recipe for chaos,” said well-known businessman and former MP, Stanley Ming on Thursday as he sought to voice his contention with the Official List of Electors (OLE) used in Guyana’s General and Region Elections.

On August 31, 2019, the national house-to-house registration exercise came to a halt, a decision of Chairman of the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM), Justice (Ret’d) Claudette Singh who hoped to balance the need for a credible List and the call for early elections. The data garnered from the registration exercise was merged with the existing National Register of Registrants Database and, in January 2020, GECOM confirmed to the populace that it would be heading into the elections with a list of 661,028 eligible voters — a figure many agreed was statistically impossible.

Prior to its confirmation, Commissioners nominated by the government argued that under no circumstance could Guyana’s population of 750,000 plus persons produce such large Voters List considering that the school-age population is around 200,000. There were also issues regarding the presence of the dead and migrated on the list and, while efforts were made through the General Registrar’s Office (GRO) to remove some of the dead, the Court ruled that residency it is not a requirement for voting in Guyana.

Even in accepting the decisions, Government-nominated Commissioners contended that with Guyana’s known history in accusations of rigged elections and calls for the recounting of votes, heading the into ‘the mother of all elections’ the most credible List should have been sought.

However, the Opposition People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C) opposed the continuation of the house-to-house registration exercise and made light of the calls to remove the dead and migrants. Fast forward to post E-Day, Guyana is now engaging in a national recount due to a breakdown in tabulation of Region Four votes and the APNU+AFC coalition has put forward its proof to show that there were people voting in the place of dead and migrant persons.

Ming’s biggest disappointment with the 2020 elections is that the said List of over 661,000 persons was used to take Guyana into the crucial elections. He believes that Guyana’s electoral system has been manipulated by various entities for years and such a List should not have been endorsed given the case.

“For you to have —- which is what they’re saying is going to come out of this election — a voter turnout and valid votes cast for the two major parties and the small parties of 440,000, it means that the people who were eligible to vote had to be 586,000. For you to have 586,000 people eligible to vote, you would have had to have a tabulation of 837,000 people because it’s only 70 per cent of the people are above the age of 18; the other 30 per cent are below,” he said while a guest on Benschop Radio 107.1 FM.

Ming’s position is that had political parties involved allowed for the completion of the house-to-house registration exercise, the current problems would have been significantly avoided. This opinion was shared by Attorney-at-Law, Nigel Hughes who was also on the programme. “As Stanley has said, the List is a major problem and there should have been full house-to-house registrations prior to elections because most people are of the firm view that the List that existed prior to elections was bloated.”

In his view, the Court’s decision that migrants cannot been removed from the National Register of Registrants Data Base (NRDB), was not in the best interest of Guyana’s elections and Guyana was “begging for trouble” heading into the elections with such a List.

This was also the firm view of Commissioner Desmond Trotman, since January 2019, who explained: “I do not want to have what we’ve been having at previous elections. After the elections, there is some faction in the society who find the results unacceptable and, for me, the one way in which you can guarantee that it will be cleansed from the impurities that exist on the present list is by doing a new house-to-house registration.”

During the ongoing recount, the PPP/C has been pushing strongly against the APNU+AFC’s objection to a range of matters such as missing poll books, missing Official List of Electors (OLE), missing PE envelopes and unsigned oaths of identity. They have also raised concerns about persons who are either deceased or who have migrated, but were recorded as voting.

Ming said that though he has been in the background of politics since 2006 he took note of the grave error on the Commission’s part to approve the said List. He said he does not blame Justice Singh as she has to act on what she’s told and often is the only deciding figure on a clearly divided Commission.

“I’m assuming that the exercise that is being carried out now at the Arthur Chung Conference Center, will reveal a lot that most of us are not aware of,” Ming said, iterating:
“The results of anything above 375,000 total votes cast is suspicious. It cannot happen with the population that Guyana has. Something is wrong, fundamentally wrong, that has to be explained to all and sundry.”

Recently, the APNU+AFC coalition submitted a list of persons listed as voted at the March elections despite being overseas. The coalition has also promised to furnish the electoral body with more evidence of same and also of persons who are deceased and listed as voted. They provided this information one day after the GECOM Chairman stated “he who asserts must show proof”.