Dear Editor,
We seem to be back to where we were in September 1991 when the then Commissioner of National Registration, Ronald Jacobs published a Preliminary List of Electors (PLE) containing a large number of duplicate names with over 50,000 eligible voters missing from the said list.
Fast forward to November 2019, a number of voices including sections of the media have raised alarm bells over the issue of voter suppression (see S/N 4/11/19) and the implications of merging data gathered from the aborted House to House registration with that of the existing National Register of Registrants (NRR).
Moreover, Henry Jeffrey in his Future Notes (S/N 2/10/19) makes an important point; “ …for the first time in Guyana’s post-independence electoral history elections have been called without the major parties having agreed upon a voter’s list that is to be used on elections day or (even more concerning) agreed upon the process for arriving at such a list.”
In the September 1991 scenario, the bungled PLE was rejected by the opposition parties grouped in the Patriotic Coalition for Democracy (PCD).
Two months after recognizing the fiasco Rudy Collins, the then Chairman of GECOM managed to pluck up the courage to advise President Hoyte that Jacob’s PLE had problems but could be corrected in time for elections to be held by December 1991.
Me and the late Bud Mangal who served as Commissioners on GECOM at that time, publicly disagreed with Collins’ assertion. We argued that the corrections were mammoth and, excluding the time-bound period for claims and objections, the corrections could not be rectified in two months.
Collins returned to Hoyte on November 28, informing him that more time was needed to correct the flawed PLE.
In the circumstances, Hoyte announced the postponement of the elections which was to be held in December 16, 1991. He recalled parliament to allow for the passage of laws mandating that elections be held in 1992. It was under these conditions that the Hoyte administration was allowed two additional years to stay in office.
Could this be the direction in which we are now heading? The lesson to be learnt from the 1991 experience is that any list birthed in controversy and deemed unacceptable by opposition parties is neither fit nor proper to be used for a free and fair elections.
At the same time, if a list is intentionally created to do as it did in 1991, then two outcomes are quite likely; first the CEO will become the fall guy and second, government will get more time in office for two other reasons, a new CEO has to be found, and that takes time and, the list will have to be corrected, and that also takes time.
Recent shenanigans by the APNU+AFC Representatives at GECOM concerning ID cards and merging data gathered from the aborted registration process with that of the existing NRR are not abstract notions. They are real, not imagined, and ought not to be underestimated. Clearly, they point to a plan with a clear objective in mind.
To claim that ‘A bad list is better than no list at all’ is tantamount to sleep walking towards a rigged elections. In fact, such an approach opens the door to allowing history to walk back in to repeat the 1991 PLE fiasco.
The question therefore is; Is the APNU+ AFC thrashing around for an excuse to postpone the March 2, elections to gain more time in government?
In 1991, Parliament was dissolved just one month before GECOM published the Official List of Electors (OLE) making it nigh impossible for the political parties to effectively scrutinize its contents to ensure it was verifiable, credible and acceptable.
If this is being contemplated by GECOM, then it should be seen as a manoeuvre aimed at presenting the opposition with a fait accompli and hoping that, with them wanting an elections so badly, they would be prepared go to the polls with ‘a bad list, which was better than no list at all’
A ‘People Test’ of the PLE/OLE as was done by GECOM in 1991 aimed at detecting fraud by random sampling could prove useful once again.
Mind you, while all this can be reduced to mere speculation and pontification, but the APNU+AFC’s track record beginning from December 21,2018, puts paid to any belief that we should be surprised by the unexpected.
Take for example the ongoing controversy over the 25,000 ID cards in GECOM’s possession and the contrived nexus of ID cards to the constitutionally protected right to vote, much has been said and written on this matter already, suffice it to say that the processes GECOM has agreed to embark upon are fraught with the strong possibility that thousands may be disenfranchised because their names would have been scrubbed from the list.
Already a perception exists out there that an ID card, is like a lottery ticket, therefore, if you don’t have a ticket (or ID card) you don’t have a chance to win or in this case, to vote.
Not having an ID card to vote is admissible, but to have one’s name deleted from the voters list because of not uplifting an ID card is unconscionable.
In this regard, Henry Jeffrey is wrong to link unclaimed ID cards to multiple voting. This is purely hypothetical since there is no evidence that there were such occurrences in past elections.
Further, by going off on an academic frolic about justice vs law, Jeffrey sought to deconstruct the PPP’s justification for opposing the Chairperson’s decision on the ID card imbroglio. Without providing a shred of evidence, other than concocted theory, Jeffrey asserts that the PPP is opposing the matter with ‘unclean hands’ yet he fails to point to those of the APNU+AFC which began to decay and rot since December 2019.
That aside, it is apposite to recall that the Commonwealth Team of Observers to the 1997 elections in their report made reference to undelivered ID cards.
They stated that among the reasons why cards remained undelivered were; persons were out of the country, miners who were in the interior and could not come out for elections, death, persons not wishing to vote, loss of card or, persons who had changed their address but did not return to the centre where they had previously registered to uplift their card.
The report noted that Region Four had the largest number of unclaimed ID cards.
According to their report, GECOM took the decision that unclaimed ID cards would be sent to polling stations in the corresponding electoral divisions so that if a person turned up claiming he didn’t have an ID card, while not disallowing the other legal options to vote, the Presiding Officer would nevertheless check among the cards held in his possession to determine if one belonged to the elector.
Once a card was found to correspond to the details provided by the elector, it would be announced and handed to the elector who would then follow the procedures to cast his or her ballot.
The Commonwealth Team also found that on the day when the Disciplined Forces voted, a large number of voters had ID cards but their names were not on the OLE, consequently, they were turned away and not allowed to vote. However, by mid-morning GECOM announced that those persons who were not allowed to vote would have their names included on the list and that they would be allowed to vote. However this exception did not apply to the electorate on elections day.
Any discovery of evidence, prima facie or otherwise, of fraud in the use of ID cards or in the Official List of Electors must be vigorously exposed.
The Secretariat at GECOM has thus far, proven itself untrustworthy. Its credibility is already on shaky ground.
The point has been made time and again that rigging these days is rarely done at the polling station, though that cannot be ruled out.
Rigging is envisaged with the recruitment of registration/elections staff, during the registration process, in the claims and objections period, in the compilation of the voters list and finally, in the production and distribution of ID cards.
In other words, come the time for voting by the Disciplined Forces and the general populace, the areas of fraud would have already been perpetrated.
That is why maximum pressure must be applied at the very early stages of the process because it is at this point in time when efforts to thwart the will of the electorate are already in motion.
Yours faithfully,
Clement J. Rohee
