After three weeks, the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) has been able to register approximately 174,000 persons as part of the contentious national house-to-house registration exercise.
Public Relations Officer Yolanda Ward told Sunday Stabroek in an invited comment yesterday that the process is moving relatively smoothly in all areas of the country.
Asked specifically about the rate of registration in interior locations, including access to Indigenous villages, Ward noted that no complaints have been received.
The national registration exercise begun on July 20th, in keeping with Order 25 of 2019, which declares it should be completed within three months, half the time budgeted for in a proposed work plan submitted in 2018 and half the time it took for a similar exercise to be completed in 2008.
The process is currently the subject of a court challenge, which argues that it violates the letter and spirit of the Constitution and the judgment and consequential orders made by the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) in the consolidated cases stemming from the passage of the no-confidence motion against government last December.
Chartered Accountant and attorney Christopher Ram, who filed the challenge, also argues that the exercise will disenfranchise persons who are on the list but may not be at their place of residence at the time of registration, especially since it proposes to discard current registrants once a new database is completed.
Acting Chief Justice Roxane George-Wiltshire is expected to rule in the matter on Wednesday, after which GECOM is scheduled to meet and decide the way forward in relation to the holding of general and regional elections, which became due following the passage of the no confidence motion against the governing APNU+AFC coalition.
A challenge has also been filed against the validity of the order for the registration exercise by Lenox Shuman, Leader of the Liberty and Justice Party.
Shuman’s attorney, Sanjeev Datadin, has said that his client’s case is different from Ram’s, while explaining that Ram is challenging the actual registration exercise, while Shuman’s challenge is to the order made by James Patterson for the exercise to commence on July 20th, by which time his appointment would have been invalidated.
According to Datadin, the declaration of the date by Patterson on June 11th was made in “bad faith,” and was “unreasonable,” since the challenge to the validity of his appointment was still being heard by the Trinidad-based CCJ—Guyana’s final appellate court.
On June 18th, the CCJ declared the process used by President David Granger to unilaterally appoint Patterson as Chairman of the GECOM to have been flawed and unconstitutional.
