–Ramjattan says will personally tell persons not to turn up

THE Leader of the Alliance For Change (AFC), Khemraj Ramjattan, has said that the party will not be participating in the upcoming Local Government Elections (LGE), which is intended to promote and sustain local democracy.

During a press briefing on Friday, Ramjattan was questioned on whether or not the party will be participating in the June 12 elections or if it will be throwing its support behind the People’s National Congress Reform-led A Partnership for National Unity (APNU).

“We are certainly not participating, and we have stated our reasons why. And we are going to ask, I personally will ask that people not turn up. Boycott the thing. We are not supporting the arrangement here… that might be for other parties. We are boycotting on very good grounds,” Ramjattan said.

The AFC intends to completely cast aside the significance of local democracy because its unfounded calls for a new voters list were not validated.

It is well documented that the list of electors scheduled to be used in 2023 is the same one used in 2015, when the APNU+AFC won the seat of government.

It is also the same list of electors used in the 2016 and 2018 LGEs. Even when contesting at that level, the AFC has suffered immense defeat; this was seen particularly in 2018, when it attracted a mere four per cent of the votes.

Vice-President Bharrat Jagdeo had dismantled claims by the APNU+AFC regarding the Official List of Electors (OLE).

He had said that the PPP/C government accepts there is a method for cleaning dead people from the list.

Jagdeo related that the new Representation of the People Act would require the names of deceased persons to be drawn from the General Register Office (GRO) by GECOM, and those names would have to be published by the elections body.

Once that is done, all the names would be sent to the political parties and once there is no objections, the names would be removed from the voters’ list.

As it relates to the removal of non-resident Guyanese, Jagdeo relied on a previous court ruling that Guyanese cannot be removed from the voters’ list because they are not resident in Guyana, a measure which was agreed to by all parties involved in the reform of the Constitution of Guyana in the early 2000s.

“You cannot vote from abroad, but you can come back and vote because no longer is ‘residency’ a requirement to be on the list,” the VP clarified, noting that the position of the APNU+AFC would go against the Constitution, which is Guyana’s supreme law.

Articles 59 and 159 of the Constitution clearly establish the qualifications and disqualifications of electors.

Articles 59 and 159 of the Constitution prescribe that a person who is 18 years or older, who is a citizen of Guyana or a Commonwealth citizen, who is not a citizen of Guyana, resident in Guyana and has been so resident for a period of one year, immediately preceding the qualifying date, qualifies to be registered; and once registered has an unconditional right to vote.

“Any constitutional change has to be to enfranchise, not disenfranchise,” Dr Jagdeo maintained.