Dear Editor,
Recently, no less than the President stated that there were “200,000 incorrect entries” on the voters’ list, the “list was corrupted and needed to be sanitized”, hence the need for a new National House-to-House Registration and a new national identification card.
No evidence or even “anecdotal stories”, to quote Minister Felix vis a vis the Haitian smuggling ring, were tendered to enlighten the population.
Where did this figure of “200,000” come from? How did the President come up with this figure? No one knows but again the PNC like a magician with his magic wand conjured up 200,000 – another example of “PNC maths” at work.
The Chief Election Officer (CEO) when questioned by the media recently disavowed that he had advised President Granger that the list was “bloated” with approximately 200,000 extra names. Lowenfield cited that the 200,000 figure is speculative. Understandable maybe, as how could he describe the voters’ list he oversaw for the 2015 general elections, as well as the voters’ list for 2016 and 2018 Local Government Elections as “bloated”? “Bloated”, he admitted, “was not a word he would affix to it”. Only a few months before he had described the same list as “clean and credible.”
If one takes the “PNC maths” seriously then let us examine this proposition by the President. The list of Guyanese registered for the last General and Regional Elections in 2015 was 570,708. This election put the PNC-led APNU+AFC Coalition in office, a list that it did not complain about then. If you reduced that List of 570,708 by Granger’s 200,000 you end up with 370,708 voters. This 370,708 is less than the number of people who actually voted at the 2015 General and Regional Elections; a total of 412,012 Guyanese voted at the 2015 Elections.
The 2018 voters’ list has 633,155 eligible voters. If one subtracts Mr. Granger’s 200,000, there are 433, 155 voters, a mere 21,143 voters more than in 2015.So is this how the PNC intends to disenfranchise thousands of eligible voters presently on the voters’ list? There is no doubt in my mind that this is the plan.
Now we have the “numbers game” with the House-to-House Registration, and again like the man with the “chic chic” board, the aim is to deliberately confuse and distract the audience.
First, we have the announcement by GECOM that 20,000 people were registered at the end of Day 2, July 22, 2019.
Then GECOM announced on July 31, 2019 that 69,547 were registered in the first 11 days.
Next the Department of Public Information on August 4, 2019 announced that 108, 814 persons were registered by August 2, 2019. When the PRO of GECOM was asked to verify this she is quoted in the media as saying that “as of the weekend (August 3-4) it was 70,000 so it should be around 100,000.”
Clearly the race is on; the GECOM secretariat is rushing to prove that this exercise can be done in 3 months, by October 20, 2019.
However, no one believes that 108, 814 persons over the age of 14 have been so far registered. The fact that GECOM has not provided any data on the numbers registered by region or by the 29 Registration Offices only increases the suspicion. The fact that the CEO issued instructions to the Registration Officers to not give the permanent PPP/C scrutineers access to that information is also suspect.
The 2008 national house-to-house registration exercise was done in six months, January 7, 2008 to July 4, 2008. 430,745 persons were registered from 14 years old and above; 33,000 were not registered as they did not have birth certificates at the time. General and regional elections were held in December 2011 after at least four continuous registration cycles and a claims and objections period.
In the 2008 house-to-house registration exercise an average of 2,393 persons were registered per day; in 2019 GECOM would have us believe that 7,254 were on average registered per day in the first 15 days. GECOM knows that this is not accurate.
Readers may need to be reminded that on June 14, 2007, the Government of Guyana, GECOM and all of the existing Parliamentary Political Parties agreed to the conduct of the 2008 House-to-House Registration. The agreement which was signed by the GOG, PPP/C, PNCR-1G, AFC, GAP-ROAR, and the United Force (TUF) stated as follows:-
“That, prior to the holding of the forthcoming Local Government elections, a national 2007 House-to-House Registration, of all eligible registrants aged 14 years and over, will be undertaken by GECOM and this will constitute the country’s new National Register of Registrants NRR)….
That all of the abovementioned Parties agree that the procedure of Continuous Registration will, thereafter, be used by the Guyana Elections Commission to update the NRR, on an ongoing basis, to ensure that a Voters’ List could be readily extracted for the holding of future elections.”
The 2008 house-to-house registration exercise was called the “Mother of All Registrations’ that would provide a new National Register of Registrants Data Base and ensure that GECOM with statutory continuous registration cycles would be in a state of readiness to hold elections at any time.
Over the last eight months, GECOM has refused to prepare for elections; this is the first time that elections have not been held within 90 days as required by the constitution. In actual fact, it is GECOM during this period that has been an integral part of the subversion of constitutional rule in our country.
How can GECOM complete this exercise in half the time that it took to do so in the 2008 registration and with a larger population base now? This becomes even more dubious when one remembers what Vincent Alexander, one of the three government- appointed members on GECOM told the media on February 11, 2019 that “July 2019 and February 2020 are the two dates Commissioners of the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) will consider for the hosting of General and Regional Elections.” According to Alexander, “…if claims and objections begin soon then you can host elections in July. If House to House registration is done, then elections would be February 2020…” Even Attorney Marcus, SC, for GECOM told the CCJ on July 1, 2019 that the house-to-house exercise would end on December 25, 2019!
What made GECOM in June this year assign half the time for the house-to-house exercise when it had projected in its work plan dated February 25th 2019, two months after the No confidence motion, that the House-to-House exercise would take from June 2nd to December 18, 2019, a total of 199 days or 6 months and 16 days? Now that the exercise started one month and 18 days later means that the date would most likely be pushed to early February 2020. Add to that the other consequential processes such data verification, cross matching of fingerprints, the production of a Preliminary Voters List, then a Claims and Objection period, followed by the production of the Official List of Electors, and you could very well be holding elections well into mid-2020.
This is a travesty unheard of in any democratic or democratic aspiring nation.
But no matter how GECOM rushes, skips people’s houses and threatens people with being locked up if they do not register, it cannot escape the timeline of article 106 (7) of the Guyana Constitution and the CCJ June 18th ruling and July 12th consequential orders.
Make no bones about it, September 18th 2019 will come and the government will be illegal. It cannot remain in office in defiance of the Constitution and the Caribbean Court of Justice.
But there are 2 options that can prevent Guyana from becoming a pariah state;-
If the Court rules on August 14, 2019 that the House to House exercise must be halted, elections preparations start immediately and elections be held as close as possible to the September 18th deadline; OR,
The Guyana Elections Commission decides to halt the House to House exercise by mid-August; within 10 days commence a three week Claims and Objections period using the November 2018 voters’ list, elections could be held as soon as early mid-October.
Both options would knowingly be past the September 18th deadline but not too distant.
Yours faithfully,
Gail Teixeira