THE delay in the commencement of house-to-house registration is being attributed to a current “bottleneck” at the National Procurement and Tender Administration Board (NPTAB) regarding the procurement of key registration equipment.

Last week Tuesday, Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) Public Relations Officer (PRO), Yolanda Ward, told the newspaper that the registration process was expected to commence mid-June, 2019 following procurement challenges.

The commission had initially planned for a June 1, 2019 commencement.
On Tuesday, June 4, 2019, GECOM Commissioner Charles Corbin relayed to the media that the challenge had not yet been resolved.

“The process is still being frustrated at the level of the Tender Board, outside of GECOM,” Corbin said.
“All we know is that the process seems to have been frozen at that level…we’re still lacking materials and we understand that the process of the acquisition, the procurement, is encountering a serious bottle neck at the level of the Tender Board.”

Last week it was also reported that training for enumerators and other staff for the impending registration had officially been completed.

Already, some 200 cluster offices country-wide have been identified which are to serve as meeting bases for the verification of information gathered by enumerators.
However, with the current challenge, enumerators are lacking the necessary equipment to begin to carry out their duties.

“The enumerators have to get materials to work with and the full complement of those materials are dependent on the suppliers and, in order to complete that process, we need the Tender Board to clear it,” Corbin said.

Meanwhile, the Commissioners also continued deliberations on the Ethnic Relation Commission’s (ERC’s) report which disagreed that there is racial bias influencing GECOM’s hiring practice.

The report came following the request of Opposition-nominated Commissioners for the ERC to conduct an investigation into GECOM’s employment practices from an ethnic perspective in relation of the decision against the hiring of Vishnu Persaud.

Back in 2018, Persaud and current Deputy Chief Election Officer (DCEO), Roxanne Myers were contending for the position Myers now holds.
Although Persaud scored higher marks at the interview, Myers was ultimately granted the position.

The ERC’s report indicated that GECOM’s Chair, Justice (Ret’d) James Patterson, gave “work-related performances and questionable integrity” as critical factors which informed the decision.

On Tuesday the Commissioners were split evenly on whether the matter should be sent to a sub-committee or be addressed at the level of the plenary.
Corbin stated that he had advocated that the matter be addressed utilising the latter option since it had already commenced in this regard.

The Commissioner stated: “The discussion, in respect of the ERC Report, has already gone a significant way at the level of the plenary. The essence of that discussion is that the Commission took on board the main conclusions in relation to the remit of the ERC in respect of the allegations which it was required to investigate. It has already been concluded that, in relation to those allegations, the ERC concluded that no evidence was adduced to support them.”

He also disagreed that there is therefore need for a change in the hiring practices of the Commission as the report found no race-related concerns.