Dear Editor,
In a letter titled `GECOM’s tinkering with Revised List of Electors is unlawful and must be discontinued’ (Stabroek News, 09/01/2020), Commissioner, Sase Gunraj, expressed alarm that the Secretariat of the Commission is manipulating the Revised List of Electors (RLE). According to the Commissioner, the revisions to the list are not only unlawful but will create confusion on Election Day (E-Day), for example, some voters may end up on lists outside the district they are supposed to vote.
On a programme on Wednesday evening, the three GECOM Commissioners representing the PPP/C indicated that there would be an emergency meeting yesterday to resolve this issue. However, I am not confident that anything useful will come out of the meeting based on recent events. Last month we saw the Chairman of GECOM voting in favour of field verification of New Registrants. The vote by the Chairman of GECOM offered a fleeting moment of hope of free and fair elections since her action signaled that she will be objective and stand on the side of fairness and decency (Demerara Waves, 18/12/2019). However, in an article published by Kaieteur News yesterday the same Chairwoman was quoted as saying, “… we can’t just remove people’s names because we could not locate them. We don’t have that right to disenfranchise these persons by removing their names from the voters’ list” (see Kaieteur News, 09/01/2020). Based on the utterance of the Chairman, it means that all the ‘New Registrants’ will be included on the list, whether their existence was verified or not. In other words, the entire list of New Registrants will be included on the RLE, thereby making the verification exercise she voted for useless. More importantly, it means that 6,000 unverified electors will be afforded an opportunity to vote on E-day; this is more than the number of votes that facilitated a victory for the APNU+AFC at the 2015 elections.
All decent-minded Guyanese must join Commissioner Gunraj and demand that GECOM stops the unlawful exercise and shenanigans as we approach E-day.
Yours faithfully,
S. Pasha
