THE Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) has said that national identification (ID) cards will only be issued after an applicant’s fingerprint and residency have been verified by officers of the elections body.

The commission said that there are a variety of statutory forms that must be filled out when applying for any of the various registration transactions, as a matter of commission policy, by GECOM Registration Staff – a task that they are trained extensively to perform. So, applicants for registration are not permitted to fill any of the forms.

“GECOM recognises that individual persons have their respective signatures which they have been using customarily. Accordingly, there is no prescribed signature requirement which must be met by applicants for registration, save and except for placing their signature in the space provided for this purpose,” the elections body said.

Residency verification is a statutory component of the process which must be completed relative to the processing of an application for registration.
In this regard, the commission – as a matter of policy – decided that registration staff must visit the residential address provided by an applicant no sooner than 48 hours after the application was made.
The justification for this is to discourage persons applying for registration from using addresses where they do not reside.

Further, this measure is pivotal to the correct placement of eligible persons in any List of Electors, to ensure that they are correctly listed to vote at polling stations for the catchment area that aligns with their residential addresses.

National ID cards are produced and issued to persons whose applications for registration are successful. GECOM is responsible for ensuring that no person is listed more than once in the National Register of Registrants (NRR).

Accordingly, the commission conducts due diligence checks for double registrations by cross-matching the fingerprints of all applicants for registration against those of the registrants who are listed in the NRR.
Fingerprints taken from applicants for registration during any given registration exercise could be dispatched for cross-matching only after the close of the exercise. Fingerprint cross-matching is currently outsourced to an overseas contractor.

It is only after the applicants for registration have been cleared as new applicants for registration, through this methodology, that they are committed to the NRR and ID cards are issued.
It is not unusual for this to take place until about two months after the closure of the particular registration exercise.
It is essential that all stakeholders make queries pertaining to the work of GECOM through the commissions’ Public Relations Officer, Yolanda Ward.