WHILE no official date has been released by the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM), Vice-President Dr. Bharrat Jagdeo has disclosed that the next General and Regional Elections will likely be held in November 2025.

Jagdeo, who is also the People Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C) General Secretary, made this disclosure on Thursday during a press conference.

“…The elections would be held in a long way off; till November of 2025, and so we [PPP/C] have quite a while to go yet, and lots of work to do,” he said.

On January 2, 2024, GECOM commenced its Claims and Objections Exercise regarding entries on the Preliminary List of Electors (PLE) to produce an Official List of Electors (OLE).

In this regard, the PLE has been posted at prominent locations in all the Registration Divisions/Sub-Divisions at all the GECOM Permanent Registration Offices countrywide, and on the Commission’s website at https://gecom.org.gy/public/home/lists.

During this exercise, any person 18 years and older as of December 31, 2023, and who is a Guyanese citizen by birth, descent, naturalisation or registration, or is a citizen from a Commonwealth country living in Guyana for one year or more, can make a claim to entry on the OLE on or before January 15, 2024, providing that he/she is not listed in the PLE.

The Commission is urging all eligible electors to use this opportunity to get registered for inclusion on the OLE, and for existing registrants to check the PLE to ensure that their particulars, as stated in the PLE, are accurate.

The March 2020 elections dragged on for months, and after a series of lengthy court battles and recount of the votes, GECOM eventually declared victory in favour of the PPP/C, and Dr. Irfaan Ali was sworn in as the President of Guyana on August 2, 2020.

Those who rejected the results filed several legal challenges, which ended up being thrown out by the courts.
In its aftermath, several GECOM officials and People’s National Congress/Reform (PNC/R) members were charged for electoral fraud.

The case involves former District Four (Demerara-Mahaica) Returning Officer Clairmont Mingo; former PNC/R Chairperson Volda Lawrence; PNC/R activist Carol Smith-Joseph, and four others.

The trio, along with Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) employees Sheffern February, Enrique Livan, Denise Bobb-Cummings and Michelle Miller, are before the court for allegedly defrauding the electors of Guyana by declaring a false account of votes for the 2020 elections.

In August 2021, Mingo, along with Lowenfield and his then-deputy, Roxanne Myers, had their employment terminated by the commission.

It is alleged that the trio inflated or facilitated the inflation of results for Region Four, the country’s largest voting district, to give the A Partnership for National Unity + Alliance For Change (APNU+AFC) coalition a majority win at the polls when, in fact, the PPP/C had won by 15,000 votes.

In April 2023, the Presidential Commission of Inquiry (CoI) into the events of the 2020 General and Regional Elections found that there was collusion and collaboration between senior GECOM officials to divert votes to the APNU +AFC, instead of safeguarding and preserving the integrity of the electoral system.

Chairman Stanley John and commissioners – former Chancellor Carl Singh and Senior Counsel Godfrey Smith – made these findings on the basis of evidence from the many witnesses who had testified, along with the reports of the international observers.

The report found that Lowenfield blatantly made decisions and employed procedures in direct contradiction to the law and the will of the people. The findings revealed too that GECOM staffers ignored specific instructions from the court, used materials that were illegal and or manipulated, and sided with APNU+AFC agents to berate observers whenever objections were raised