CARTER Centre’s preliminary three-man team of election observers, currently in Guyana, will be joined by a team led by none other than former United States president Jimmy Carter in May, ahead of the upcoming polls.“I look forward to leading our delegation to observe Guyana’s elections on May 11. The Carter Center has a long history in Guyana and great respect for the Guyanese people. These will be the fourth elections we have observed there since 1992, and we trust they will be peaceful and inspire hope for the future,” the former president said in a statement released by the Carter Centre yesterday.

Assistant Director from the Carter Centre’s Global Development Initiative, Mr Jason Calder, is heading the team presently in Guyana. The other members include Mr Pedro Teixeira and Mr Bartek Lech.
Ahead of Carter’s arrival, an additional six medium-term observers, from nine countries, are expected to be in the country this week.
According to the Carter Centre, its observers will meet regularly with representatives of the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM), political party candidates, civil society organizations, the international community, and citizen election observers to assess electoral preparations and the pre-electoral environment, including election administration, campaigning, voter education, and other issues.
The full team is expected to be involved in assessing the voting, counting, and tabulation processes.
“With the Guyana mission, The Carter Center reaches an important milestone: its 100th election observation. The first took place in Panama in 1989 during a hotly contested race that the Center declared fraudulent. Since then, the Center has observed elections in 38 countries,” the Carter Centre said.
It added that, “The Carter Center’s election observation mission is conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Principles for International Election Observation and Code of Conduct that was commemorated at the United Nations in 2005 and has been endorsed by 49 election observation groups. The Center assesses the electoral process based on Guyana’s national legal framework and its obligations for democratic elections contained in regional and international agreements.”
The Carter Center’s fielding of an international election observation mission for Guyana’s May 11 elections was in response to an invitation of the Government of Guyana. Additionally, the Private Sector Commission (PSC), in the latter part of March, wrote to US Secretary of State John Kerry requesting his assistance to have the Carter Center field a full observer mission for the elections.
The move is part of its ongoing quest to ensure that the May 2015 elections will be free and fair.
Foreign observers, according to GECOM’s observer protocols, will be expected to adhere to more than 35 guidelines. In addition to the guidelines, the rights and privileges of accredited election observer groups were also outlined in the protocol. Similar rights and guidelines apply to local observer groups, which were detailed in a separate document seen by this newspaper. (Vanessa Narine)