… Alexander says 500,000-list exceeds resident voters
… insists new round of registration key to new elections

GECOM to decide on readiness tomorrow
THE Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) will meet on Thursday this week to discuss when new General and Regional Elections can be held and long-standing commissioner Vincent Alexander stressed the need to have a new round of house-to-house registration as per a decision taken years ago.

Following Thursday’s meeting, and at the soonest possible time, the commission will meet with the government and opposition chief whips to discuss the entity’s readiness for the same.

At the end of the first statutory meeting of the commission on Tuesday, which also marked the return of GECOM’s Chair Justice (ret’d) James Patterson, a few of the commissioner’s briefed the media on the proceedings of the meeting.

BEST LIST A PRIORITY
Alexander’s view is that despite the circumstances surrounding an election, whether routine or urgent, the best list must be the commission’s priority. “I am an advocate for house-to-house registration. I am not only an advocate, but one who is aware of the institutional decision taken years ago that we should have registration every seven years; and that we haven’t means that we do not have what is considered to be the ‘best list’,” Alexander said.

He further stated that this has been a collective view expressed by commissioners as the scheduled house-to-house registration would rid the list of persons now deceased. “Some people feel that we have to get the dead off the list. The fact of the matter is, we do get the official dead off the list…but in any circumstance I do think that the number of dead people on the list is a minority of the excess. We have a population of 740,000 I’m told; we have a list in the vicinity of 500,000, which is clear that the list is in excess of the resident voters. In my view, that allows for the elections to be corrupted in the sense that political people can use the excess to manipulate voting and have a result that is not reflective of the resident Guyanese; and so we need to deal with that,” Alexander affirmed.

He stated that while there are efforts in place to prevent such occurrences, he would rather to err on the side of caution.
Alexander also reminded the media that the constitution is clear when it stipulates that elections ought to be held within 90 days, or any such time that has been determined. “If we have reasonable and logical people discussing the matter, it’s not a matter of just 90 days, it’s a matter of anytime that is considered to be reasonable time in the circumstances…the constitution has anticipated the possibility that it cannot be done in 90 days,” he stated.

Another commissioner, Desmond Trotman, shared similar views on the matter of registration as he told the media: “I do believe that we need a new house-to-house registration in order to legitimise the process. 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.”

The meeting is scheduled to commence at 09:00hrs and will also see pertinent election-related issues such as staffing, materials and statutory deadlines being discussed.
Meanwhile, in preparation for Thursday’s meeting, another commissioner, Sase Gunraj said: “We at the commission level have to get a report from the secretariat. We’ve put a system in place whereby the CEO will prepare that report for us and hopefully we’ll have it within 24 hours; and we are meeting again on Thursday morning to go through that report,” said Gunraj, a People’s Progressive Party (PPP)-nominated commissioner.
He stated that the report would contain the “vagaries that would affect readiness for the elections,” but only after Thursday’s meeting would the commissioners be able to provide more feedback.

Meanwhile, his colleague Commissioner Bibi Shadick added:“[It will include] what’s the longest possible time he needs, the optimum time or the shortest possible time that we can deliberate on those and come to some kind of [agreement]. Because, you know, he has to have time to do certain things.” With the provision of such information, Shadick believes that stakeholders in the mix will be better informed.

Patterson had suspended the0 previous agenda of the meeting, which did not include electoral matters as a topic for discussion to facilitate the same.
Shadick confirmed this, stating: “I must say that the suspension of the agenda was at the chairman’s request. We didn’t have to ask to suspend the agenda, the chairman said that first, we agreed and so we continued to discuss.”

On the issue of the current list, both Shadick and Gunraj said it is valid for General and Regional Elections, noting that it would expire only on April 30, 2019. “If the CEO gives a timeline…that is necessary for everything like to procure this or to procure that, and that timeline will take us beyond the 30th then he may have other things that may have to be done [and have to state] how quickly those things can be done,” Shadick acknowledged.

However, speaking further on the possible facilitation of new house-to-house registration, she said: “If that has to be accommodated then we’re saying to the constitution ‘go wherever you want, we’re doing what we want’.”