The Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) will today be meeting with representatives of the governing APNU+AFC coalition as the question of a date for general elections remains up in the air.
The meeting scheduled for this morning at 10 comes three days after the commission met with a delegation from the People’s Progressive Party/Civic and two days after Chairman, retired Justice Claudette Singh met with representatives of the US-based Carter Center which has been meeting stakeholders on elections-related matters.
“The commission was supposed to have a meeting [yesterday] but late [Wednesday] evening I got an email to say the meeting was postponed because AFC and APNU are to meet with the commission 10 am today,” Opposition-nominated Commissioner Bibi Shadick said last evening.
Shadick is convinced that the commission is unlikely to get any work done following this meeting as was the case last Tuesday when according to government-nominated Commissioner Vincent Alexander the commission only “went through the minutes” after their two-hour engagement with Opposition Leader Bharrat Jagdeo and his entourage.
Asked about the meeting between Singh and the Carter Center, Shadick said that commissioners “never even knew that the Carter Center wanted to meet the Chairman.”
Public Relations Officer Yolanda Ward told this newspaper that the Carter Center met with the Chairman on Wednesday but noted that she had no details on the nature or outcome of the engagement. Singh could not be contacted by Stabroek News for comment on the meeting.
Meanwhile, both sides of the commission remain unconcerned about any impact the health of the Chief Election Officer Keith Lowenfield would have on the preparations for elections.
Lowenfield, who left Tuesday’s meeting early, was admitted to the Caribbean Heart Institute (CHI) after experiencing a spike in his blood pressure. It was the second time this year he had been admitted for observation at the CHI and this has raised questions about whether he is medically fit to preside over the upcoming elections.
Asked for an update on Lowenfield’s health, Ward said she was unaware of whether he had reported ill or requested sick leave but he had not been in office since Tuesday.
“I understand his role is critical but even though he is a public official his health is a private matter and should be treated as such. I prefer to allow him to have some rest,” she said.
Shadick in turn noted that in the short term Lowenfield’s absence is unlikely to impact elections preparations.
“If Mr Lowenfield is ill there is a deputy who according to the powers that put her there is competent to function. Lowenfield doesn’t do the work himself there are officers who execute,” she stated while Government nominated Commissioner Charles Corbin said that he is concerned about the CEO’s health but not about the functioning of the secretariat in the short term.
Primed
“I think the secretariat is primed to function in his absence. The way he runs the organization; he has a strong management team and management structure which can continue to function. It’s not a one- man show,” he explained
Corbin also said that in his opinion the commission should be “sufficiently advanced” following today’s meeting to advise President David Granger as to a likely date of its readiness to conduct General and Regional Elections.
The Secretariat of GECOM last week presented to the commissioners a draft schedule of timelines which sets the earliest date for General and Regional Elections as March 2020.
This followed a decision by Singh to end the house-to-house registration exercise, which began on July 20th, from August 31st and merge the data garnered with the National Register of Registrants (NRR). The commission is then expected to hold an extended claims and objections exercise before moving to the holding of elections. The PPP/C has been pressing for the holding of the polls as early as possible as a result of the passage of a no-confidence motion against the government since last December, which should have triggered elections within three months.
The timeline presented by the Secretariat is most impacted by times proposed for the merger of HtH data and the gap between Nomination Day and Election Day.
The gap which in the past had been 32 to 34 days has been widened to 55. According to a press statement on Thursday this change is justifiable and does not breach any law and is definitely not intended to delay the holding of elections.
Ward sought to explain that historically some statutory timelines, which took as much as 10 days after Nominations Day, were bypassed once no errors were identified in the submitted list of nominees. However, she said that GECOM’s Operations Sub-Committee had decided at a meeting on July 17th, 2018, that all statutory timelines must be adhered to. The subcommittee is co-chaired by Commissioners Sase Gunraj and Charles Corbin and according to Ward their proposal was subsequently presented to and adopted by the full commission.
Additionally, according to the PRO, ballots will be printed overseas and the service provider has provided a 21 days duration for the printing only. Shipping is likely to be another 5 to 7 days.
“Upon arrival of the ballots in Guyana, there will be a process of extracting ballots to ship overseas to all the Non-Resident Ambassadors to allow for them to vote. This will take as much as 14 days to be completed,” she concluded.
Ward further indicated yesterday that while there is no information on a proposed deadline for the completion of the current encoding of information collected during HtH, it will be completed within the shortest possible time.
“Encoding is an ongoing project,” she said of the process which according to the proposed timeline should take two weeks.
Stabroek News understands that the Secretariat has proposed to complete the encoding of 370,822 registrants from the recently concluded HtH registration exercise over a period of two weeks. This is despite the fact that only 112,000 of these registrants were encoded over the month of August.
In order to speed up the process, the Secretariat has employed three teams who will work eight-hour shifts over the coming days. Previously, only one team worked to encode all the data collected, according to the source.
Following this encoding, it is expected that the commission will review the project report over a 10-day period following which a contractor will, over 16 days, conduct fingerprint cross-matching to verify the data.
Any queries resulting from this process are expected to be investigated over a period of 28 days.
Altogether, it will be more than two months before a preliminary list of electors is published and the claims and objections process activated.
The opposition PPP is continuing to argue that the HtH has to be abandoned as the Constitution requires general elections to be held within three months of the passage of a motion of no-confidence.
