In 1992, the celebrated year of the return of democracy after much sought after electoral reforms, including house-to-house (HtH) registration, the population of Guyana was about 748,600 and there were 348,195 registered voters. In 2015, the year of the last general and regional elections, the population was 767,432, an increase of 18,832 or about 2.5%, but the number of registered voters was 585,722, an increase of 237,527 or 68.2%. It is then no wonder that on the face of it, President David Granger has claimed that the just expired electoral list was bloated by some 200,000 voters. Recently, Prime Minister Moses Nagamootoo attempted to explain the problem with the list in terms of a decrease and sudden increase in the votes going to the PPP/C. (Guyana Chronicle: 01/09/2018). I believe that both of the above approaches are problematical: the former does not pay sufficient attention to the age distribution of the population and the latter to the appearance of the AFC on the political scene.
Once one of the significant parties insists that the electoral list is flawed an objective effort must be made to fix the problem before elections are held and for me, this trumps constitutional and other legal concerns. Constitutions are made by people for people and not the other way round, and they must be reformed (I have argued in this column that the Swiss consensual model of governance is more suited to our ethnic context, and since their written constitution in 1874, 145 years ago, they have changed it some 118 times, or an average of about every 14 months since then, yet Switzerland is considered one of the most stable democracies and best countries in the world in which to live – https://www.academia.edu/5120269/FEDERALISM _IN SWITZERLAND?auto=download) and interpreted – as was done by the CCJ – to deliver justice. It cannot be right to force Guyanese to go to an election with a bloated list and for what it’s worth, my rudimentary analysis below suggests that the recently expired voters list is substantially flawed.
. Elections 2015*
Population 767,432
Eligible voters 495,432
Non-registrants 2% 9,908
Potential voters 485,524
Actual Registered voters 585,722
Actual over potential (AoP) voters 100,198
Seats of (AoP) in the National Assembly @ 6,325 per
seat 16
* I believe I have been extremely liberal against my position but yet the above calculations suggest that, by one means or another, the list has become bloated by about 100,198 votes, which represents over 16 seats in the National Assembly. Eligible voters resulted from my assumption that there existed on average 16,000 underage persons per year for 17 years (they will vote in their 18th year). Notwithstanding the excitement in 1992, more than 10% were not registered but I put that figure at only 2% of eligible voters in 2015. Thus the voters’ list for 2015 should have been around 485,524 persons, but it was over 100,198 more. This is for me a sufficient prima facie case that the list is substantially bloated and should be attended to. My only concern is that the PPP/C has not participated sufficiently in the process and I do not trust the PNCR not to take advantage of its absence and transfer the excess to itself!
The PPP/C’s present attempt to hoodwink the population by falsely appealing to its respect for the law is simply self-serving and certainly not in keeping with that party’s own practice. A constitutional breach that is arguably as important to the body politic and particularly to ordinary people must be the dilution of the actual separation of powers for over a decade by leaving the top echelons of the judiciary in acting positions as a result of which they are likely to be influenced by the executive. Many a commentator and the CCJ have condemned the situation, but when has the PPP/C previously shown a similar level of urgency to rectify the situation? Instead, it has benefitted from all manner of questionable court decisions and now has to be meek as the government follows its example!
The fact that agreement had to be reached between the president and the leader of the opposition before substantive appointments could be made is not an excuse. It was incumbent on the PPP/C to do its utmost to rectify this major constitutional shortcoming, but where is the evidence that it did so? Where is the evidence that it placed before the constitutional reform committee and forcefully fought for alternative methods of appointment? Indeed, some are jovially suggesting that that committee itself may now be in a state of constitutional desuetude (‘Constitutional desuetude occurs when an entrenched constitutional provision becomes politically inoperative as a result of sustained and conscious disuse by political actors’
(https://www.bu.edu/bulawreview/files/2014/08/ALBERT DYSFUNCTION .pdf)!
The PPP/C’s position is simply not tenable. Shocked by its defeat at the 2015 elections that it claimed were rigged against it, not unlike the dizziness of the APNU+AFC when it initially accepted the no-confidence vote (NCV), it made some proposals for reform of the electoral process, and among these was the implementation of HtH registration. Did it not know that the process of continuous registration was available? Yet when the PNCR began to demand HtH registration in mid 2018, it immediately began to claim that that party was demanding it to delay elections beyond the constitutionally due date of May 2020. When the government showed its determination to have HtH, the PPP/C introduced a no confidence motion that would have required the government to abort the HtH process of cleaning the list. When it dawned upon the regime that if it accepted the NCM, as it initially did, it would in effect be going to an election with a voters’ list that it believed to be massively rigged, it became involved in all manner of legal and other shenanigans to delay the elections and complete the HtH process.
The current quarrel between the APNU and the PPP/C has nothing to do with wanting to delay elections: it is a struggle over the bloated electoral list as the PPP/C admitted after the Chief Justice’s recent decision that the HtH registration was legal! The trajectory was foreseeable and the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) would have been irresponsible to merely rely upon ‘the dead words of the written text’ to set a date for elections. Instead, refusing to be tyrannized by statute law and recognising the political and legal complications that are involved, the court wisely outlined a conceptual framework, sending the parties away to negotiate a way forward in the spirit and letter of the constitution, bearing in mind the dialectics that must exist between adherence to principles and what is practical.
The problem is that particularly in politics not everything can be negotiated and compromised. There are points at which compromise become surrender and we need to understand that the current process threatens the electoral capacity of the PPP/C and also can significantly dent its vaunted electoral morality. The PPP/C has made Forbes Burnham the poster boy of elections rigging and it now appears that over many elections it may have been doing a similar thing – rigging elections long before voting day! These are non-negotiable issues, and that is a reason why objective arbitration courts exist. GECOM is a legally binding arbitration process, the decisions of which both the PPP/C and the PNCR have agreed to abide by. It should be left to do its work without the ceaseless pressure emanating from extremely dubious and narrow speculations about what is lawful.
