…commissioners want political heads to decide
AFTER hours of deliberations going into the night, the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) was unable to come to a consensus on how much time it needs to prepare for General and Regional Elections.
The commission instead has decided that the chief whips of both government and opposition will meet today at 13:00hrs to listen to the sides of the debate and have their principal heads decide on the way forward.
On Thursday at 09:00hrs, the full commission convened at GECOM’s head office; broke for lunch around midday; reconvened at 16:30hrs and did not conclude until around 19:30hrs.
However, the longs hours proved to be futile as, coming out of the meeting, the commissioners told the media that there were stark differences of opinions and proposals shared.
Asked to speak based on his experience in the work on the average time such could take he said: “GECOM itself in the past has discussed and enunciated on the question of a timeframe for unscheduled elections and that, which is in our records, was 180 days.”
However, Commissioner Robeson Benn also put forward other rationale, for early elections stating: “Based on the documentation that appears from the get go, there is an effort to say that training in itself takes 90 days. That knocks out completely the holding of elections. When I looked at it first, I had 29 days to do the training and then I got 32 days because the training effort would be on people who were just trained for the Local Government Elections.
These people are already trained; they’re not stupid; they are aware of the process and all they need to do is tweak the training material and to change the training and instead of waiting on weekends to do the training, do it during the week.”
Alexander said that GECOM’s Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Keith Lowenfield had objected and warned against such rapid preparation methods. “The CEO clearly said that the time is insufficient if you want to hold the elections in March, which is what they are calling for now. He’s saying that you really want to create a situation to prove the incompetence of GECOM by mandating us to do something that is undoable…to train people to be prepared for an election in March,” he said.
The commissioners also disagree on whether a claims and objections period should be held before the list is verified as fit for an election. “Act No. 15 of 2000 mandates that claims and objections period ought to be held to refresh or give life to the list. Never, in 2001, 2006, 2011, 2015, 2016 and 2018 when we contemplated the holding of elections was there an active list that we have now. I say all of that to say to you that there’s not a legal requirement for any sort of refreshing of the list in terms of house-to-house registration; in terms of claims and objections; in terms of continuous registration. We have an active list,” Sae Gunraj, another PPP-nominated commissioner said.
However, Alexander maintains that while house-to-house registration is still a viable option, at minimum, the other commissioners are pushing for there to be a claims and objections period for the cleansing of the list. “If one looks to the petition of the PPP to which Commissioner Bibi Shadick was a participant, they said that people have impersonated voters who were on the list. This says that we have accepted that the list is flawed but now they are unprepared to go to an election with a claims and objections –at minimum – which allows for some cleansing of the list,” Alexander said.
The PPP-nominated commissioners are staunch on the position that elections can be held within the 90-day period. They based their reasoning on the recent Local Government Elections (LGE) voters’ list which they pointed out is valid until April 30, 2019. The commissioners also believe that the training of workers; procurement of materials and other processes needed to facilitate an election can be hurried up with Shadick even putting forward her own suggested timeline which she says would take only 50 days.
“I have produced to the elections commission a timeline that will allow that to happen, taking into consideration all the tasks that the CEO says he has to do…I gave them a timeline that is achievable in 50 days,” Shadick said. These suggestions, however, did not sit well with the other commissioners.
SHADICK MISSPOKE
There was also some fall out at the meeting where Shadick referred to the CEO as “thoroughly confused”, which Alexander said is a contradiction to reservations they had about the CEO prior to the engagement. Coming out of the meeting, Gunraj described the commission as “frustrated”, while Benn stated that between the back and forth deliberations “we have lost our way”.
“The decision was that we will say to the emissaries of the President and the leader of the opposition what we said to each other, so in some regards the ball would be in their court,” Alexander explained, adding: “For time being it seems as if there will have to be a political solution.”
