Ninety-one thousand entries on the Revised Voters List (RVL) require address changes stemming from the controversial house-to-house (HtH) enumeration last year, posing a major headache for GECOM with just a few more days before the final voters list has to be published.
“It’s a mess,” Opposition-nominated Commissioner Bibi Shadick told reporters yesterday.
She explained that last week the secretariat provided commissioners with a list “of just over 11,000 names whose addresses are being changed” but yesterday they told the Commission that it was a partial list.
“The full list is over 91,000 and they haven’t given us it yet. RLE [revised list of electors] has to close on (January) 25 for the OLE to be published so tell me when people are going to know whether they are making changes to affect their ability to vote.” Shadick questioned adding that the commission has promised to provide commissioners the full list by noon tomorrow.
For months GECOM has dithered on what to do with the unverified data from the HtH.
While Shadick seemed disturbed at the pace the secretariat was moving, Government-nominated Commissioner Vincent Alexander was unperturbed.
“During the HtH, GECOM staff registered 370,000 persons of which approximately 90,000 changed their address which is simply a reflection of people moving from one place to another,” he explained adding that the Opposition’s request for a copy of the list was a “waste of time.”
“These persons have been duly registered in a legitimate registration exercise and the opposition keeps calling for information that cannot be acted upon since there is no basis to act. Same question was raised in relation to the 6,000 [unverified new registrants from HtH]. Why were they not found? There is no one to say they didn’t travel or were simply not at home…what can you do about it? Nothing,” he stressed.
In an exercise which lasted four days, the 16,863 supposedly new registrants recorded during the truncated HtH registration exercise were scheduled to receive visits to verify that they are indeed first-time registrants. Opposition-appointed commissioners of GECOM had demanded the verification exercise, citing the fact that a list of over 20,000 allegedly first-time registrants from the HtH exercise was found to contain names that were already on the National Register of Registrants (NRR).
Following the exercise last month GECOM was unable to locate 6,534 of these new registrants recorded during the truncated exercise.
According to information released by GECOM’s Public Relations Officer (PRO) Yolanda Warde, 10,329 registrants were verified, while 6,534 were not.
Warde said that those 6,534 persons could not be verified for various reasons, including not being home when GECOM operatives and scrutineers from political parties visited.
Despite these findings GECOM chair retired Justice Claudette Singh decided to include all the names on the NRR so as not to disenfranchise any potential voter.
