The Guyana Elections Com-mission (Gecom) says it is unfortunate that its thoroughness in the ongoing house-to-house registration is being “wilfully misconstrued” as slothfulness and has insisted that any delay in the editing of transactions would be linked to its multi-tiered quality control measures.
The commission yesterday organized a media tour of its data entry registration and electoral list sections and Voter Registration Manager Beverly Critchlow explained that the department could only edit the completed transactions as they came in from the field, after which they are sent to be encoded.
Gecom has come in for criticism for the pace of its registration process. Just last week at a press conference, PPP General Secretary Donald Ramotar told reporters that the party’s Central Committee discussed the problems being encountered in the registration process. He said the issue of no birth certificates was persistent and the situation relating to names of persons was not yet resolved.
Ramotar said that the committee also noted that the pace of work in editing and encoding information from the field was too slow and would delay the process of producing the new list necessary for local government elections. The editing section commenced work in January with 23 staff members and this was later increased to 65 to deal with the accumulated number of completed field transactions.
Critchlow explained that the information on completed transactions was edited and verified to ensure that all of the pertinent details of applicants for registration were accurately documented.
For encoding purposes, Gecom currently has two shifts of 50 employees each and only on Monday started another shift to speed the process. With the addition to its employ, Gecom has started to complete over 5,000 transactions each day.
Gecom, in a statement issued following the tour, said that of the 50 persons on each shift 12 were involved in data entry, while another dozen were involved with the separate entries of the details of registrants already inputted by the initial 12. Gecom said that with the double entry system, there was not only the original checking of incoming data being carried out, but also a second check as well to add certitude to the final data entry into the system.
Gecom said its two-shift system was introduced 101 days from the commencement of the exercise. It said too that this was a conscious decision because it was convinced that it was not necessary to have too many editors/encoders at the beginning of the exercise.
The commission has edited 29,151 transactions and encoded 130,250 as at May 18. The Gecom statement also emphasised that the multi-tiered editing system, which commences at the level of the Cluster Offices and concludes in the encoding section is geared to ensure thoroughness pertaining to registrants’ accurate data capture.
“Naturally the inherent need for this to be done is aimed at the creation of a new and indisputable National Register of Registrants Database from which commonly acceptable voters’ lists for future elections could be derived,” the statement added.
