THE Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) will be pre-positioning ballots for the ease of movement during the Local Government Elections (LGEs) voting of Disciplined Services ranks scheduled for November 2, 2018.

“For the minimisation of movement, we will be pre-positioning in some locations the location of these ballots to ensure there is an easy and quick move on the day,” GECOM Chief Election Officer (CEO), Keith Lowenfield said.

Giving an example he said: “For example we’ll be pre-positioning the boxes for Springlands Police and Army at the Whim location, New Amsterdam location, and Fort Wellington locations. They’re all located in ‘B’ Division of the police so as against making one long movement on the day, we have prepositioned those boxes intended for all ranks of the army, police and prisons in those locations eastward.”

He further added: “We’ll also be pre-positioning at Bartica on November 1. That takes care of ranks from the prison service stationed at the Mazaruni Prisons; the Bartica Police Station and we’ll be going as far West as St. Mary’s Police Station up the Essequibo River.”
CEO assured that planning for these movements is well-developed.

“Our preparation for the conduct of Disciplined Services balloting is very well advanced. I’ve had the opportunity this morning to brief stakeholders, those who attended, on all our moves for disciplined service balloting and to request of them for their involvement for the provision of agents or scrutineers to be part of that process,” Lowenfield said.

He added that since the ballots arrived on October 22, GECOM has been able to extract the ballots specifically for the Disciplined Services. These include ranks from the Guyana Police Force (GPF); the Guyana Prison Service (GPS) and the Guyana Defence Force (GDF).
“We’ve completed that. We’ve extracted those ballots and we’ve sorted them out by polling stations. That is to say, when we extract we take it to the location where the rank is currently stationed and balloting will take place at those locations,” Lowenfield said.
He added that the location of balloting stations across the spectrum have been both gazetted and published.