MY article captioned “GECOM should address voter documentation issues”, published  by the Guyana Chronicle in its Thursday edition, was an eye opener to a potentially dangerous and explosive situation waiting to happen if the necessary steps aren’t taken to rectify it. Now, I gave the matter some serious thought and consideration wherein the possible worst case scenario was envisaged, and here’s my reason for saying this. GECOM, in that brainless scheme of theirs, disenfranchised very many voters at the onset of their registration exercise by turning them away with the ‘no birth certificate, no registration’ policy. These were individuals who carried their names for all their lives and for which there were valid IDs, but GECOM could not be bothered. These are legitimate persons who were deliberately locked out from the upcoming electoral process.
So my question is what will the procedure be when those persons turn up to vote on November 28? Would the polling agents turn them away yet again because their names would not be on the voters list? We are all cognizant of the fact that, once you are not registered, you cannot vote. This is the danger/precedent GECOM has set out before us, where hundreds of potential voters were disenfranchised by a deliberate act. One can sense the intense unexpressed anger boiling up within the breasts of those affected.

With this in mind, where do we go from here? The evil scheme is done and the time is late, therefore the only thing left us is to grant those individuals their God given right to vote, once they have a valid form of identification. This procedure has been done in other jurisdictions right here in the Caribbean. If GECOM has any reservations, they can confer with electoral officials in other sister CARICOM states. There is no need to fear the possibility of multiple balloting, because copious amounts of indelible ink will suffice. After all, GECOM is the one who got us into this mess, and the solution mentioned earlier is the only way out of it.