The Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) is seeking technical assistance on data merging from the Electoral Commission of Jamaica.
According to Public Relations Officer Yolanda Ward, Deputy Chief Elec-tion Officer Roxanne Myers and the commission’s Information Techno-logy Manager are in Jamai-ca examining practices in data merging, cross-matching of fingerprints and verifying processes.
It is expected that upon their return “before Monday” they will update the secretariat which will then provide a work programme for the commission to examine at its Tuesday meeting.
The commission has decided to truncate the controversial House to House registration process and “merge” the data collected with the National Register of Registrants Database (NRRD).
While both sides of the commission have accepted the suspension of the exercise which will end on August 31, 2019 the Opposition has raised objections about the planned merger.
According to a statement issued by the party, while the decision to end the registration process is the only logical decision that could have been made, the planned merger of data will not improve the quality or ‘credibility’ of the database. Instead, the party said it will further contaminate the NRRD and cause further delays in the holding of elections. This position was explained by the PPP/C-nominated commissioners.
“I maintain that information from house-to-house is unverified data and as a consequence it should not be used,” Commissioner Sase Gunraj told reporters, while his colleague Robeson Benn argued that “any merging or verification of data by using house-to-house data is wrong.”
Benn maintained that it will take a long time to merge the information and will contaminate the National Register of Registrants since a large number of the person registered during the exercise will appear as duplicates and each will have to be investigated in keeping with the previous practice of the Commission.
The party in turn questioned what data exactly is being merged with the National Register of Registrants Database. “Is it the entire 270,000-plus persons that GECOM claimed to have registered, including persons who were re-registered? If it is only the new registrants, why em-bark on this process, which will take several months to be completed, when it could easily be done in a Claims and Objections period,” it asked.
At his weekly press conference yesterday Opposition Leader Bharrat Jagdeo said that based on a work programme provided the merger should take about three months since the data collected by the enumerators has not been entered into any database.
According to Ward some of the data has actually been computerized.
“This is a work in progress. A team has been working for about three weeks [to computerize the data],” she indicated.
