Young people are very cynical when it comes to elections; they don’t think it actively affects them and that is what we are trying to show them,” visiting voting rights expert Marcia Johnson-Blanco said on Monday.
Johnson-Blanco, a Linden-born American, is Co-Director of the Lawyers’ Committee Voting Rights Project and Adjunct Professor of Law at the Georgetown University Law Centre.
Ahead of a fund raising dinner on Monday to support the work of the Guyanese Women’s Roundtable (GWR), Johnson-Blanco expressed her joy to be here in this “exciting time.”
She also noted that a lot of people have an ingrained cultural idea that they should be loyal to a party even if they don’t represent their best interest. Young people, in particular, she added, need to be activist if they want solutions to their problems.
Ahead of Monday’s general elections, Johnson-Blanco and GWR activist Dawn Stewart are facilitating voters’ education and voters’ issues fairs that will be held during the week.
At a press conference held on Monday at the Monique’s Caring Hands Support Centre, Stewart said the GWR is trying to create an understanding and harmony before elections and make Guyana a more peaceful and healthy democracy. She noted that Guyana is a “young” country and can only mature if its women and youths find their voices.
Monday’s fundraising dinner, hosted at the Pegasus Hotel, was intended to raise funds to hire buses to shuttle the elderly from regions Three and Four to their respective polling stations between 6AM and 12PM on polling day, so they can “vote early and then go home and, as the young people say, chill,” Stewart stated.
