THE  issue of whether there will be a new round of Claims and Objections for the upcoming elections has now been laid to rest as the Commissioners of the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) voted in a majority to support the re-opening. What is significant about the decision is the fact that the Commissioners who voted against the re-opening seem to be supportive of the process and has not expressed any bitterness.
On the contrary, they have indicated that they were only expressing their democratic right and gave acceptable reasons why they objected.

According to one Commissioner: “Bearing in mind that the Guyanese people had, from 2008 to 2011, an opportunity to register, one cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, claim that GECOM had disenfranchised people.”

It is obvious that any contentious issue will have its pros and cons and the issue of re-opening of the Claims and Objections is no different.

However, what is baffling about the issue is the fact that the opposition political parties made a deliberate effort to turn it into a political issue, making the ridiculous charge that the ruling party was trying to delay the elections.

One party even charged that the ruling party was seeking an advantage by requesting a re-opening of the process and mounted a picketing protest outside of GECOM’s office.

That party’s line of reasoning is startling, to say the least, because by what means of logic can the ruling party gain an advantage?  Who knows which party those unregistered persons would vote for?

Is it a case of that party having a mysterious mechanism to determine which party they would vote for?  Further, if they do have such a mechanism, it  logically follows that it must have told them that those unregistered persons would vote for the ruling party, hence their vehement opposition to the re-opening process.

It is also unbelievable that the opposition would make the spurious charge that the ruling party is seeking to delay the elections when it was and is clearly established that the re-opening process would not affect the date of the elections.
The fundamental issue here is the fact that a large number of persons (nearly 40,000) eligible to vote have not been registered, mainly due to  lack of the required documents, and therefore the credibility of the elections would have been called into question.
A national election must be a true reflection of the people’s will and, if a sizeable proportion of electors are disenfranchised, then it is obvious that it will be debatable as to whether the elections truly reflect the will of the people.

What many seem to have forgotten is that the ruling party’s history is integrally linked to the struggle for the establishment of Universal Adult Suffrage (one man, one vote) which eventually fructified in 1953 and the ruling party’s first victory at an election held under this system.

The party had to be engaged in another battle for the restoration of free and fair elections following the rigged elections of 1968, 1973 and 1985,as well as the fraudulent 1978 referendum.

So the position of the ruling party is not surprising, because it has a history of fighting for people’s right to exercise their franchise and this position has not changed.

What the opposition may fail to realise is, by opposing the re-opening process, it might have the boomerang effect because those unregistered persons, who may have been sympathetic or supportive to the opposition, may decide to vote for the ruling party because they may decide that they cannot vote for someone who was opposed to them being registered as a voter.

However, the dust on the matter should have settled now and all political parties should now work energetically towards getting the unregistered persons putting themselves in order during this new Claims and Objections period.

GECOM’s Chairman Dr. Steve Surujbally correctly advised: “I take this opportunity to invite all of the electors who are now in possession of their source documents to make every effort to become registered…I also invite all political parties to make full use of this opportunity to enthuse their constituents to get registered during the exercise.”