In the backdrop of the five-month elections standoff earlier this year, the PPP/C government has drafted a list of electoral reforms including having an external agency conducting registration and then handing the data to GECOM near to the polls.
This was disclosed yesterday by Attorney General Anil Nandlall who said that offers of electoral aid from Canada and a number of other countries and agencies will be taken up.
With a list of top priorities already drafted, the Attorney General said that it includes strengthening the continuous registration process which could include having an external organization undertake registration and present the data to the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) near to elections, a legislative outline of how votes in ballot boxes are verified and stiffer penalties for electoral crimes.
“The Canadian High Commission, the Indian High Commission, the UK High Commission and several organizations within the United Nations resident in Guyana, among other organizations, including the Carter Center have all pledged assistance in the form of human resource personnel and technical and financial assistance to the government’s planned reform of the electoral process and the electoral machinery here,” Nandlall told Stabroek News when contacted.
“These pledges have been accepted and all these organizations have been informed that when the reform process begins next year, they will be contacted,” he added.
On Saturday, during an interview with this newspaper, outgoing High Commissioner of Canada Lilian Chatterjee announ-ced that Ottawa has pledged further support to electoral reforms and is awaiting the government’s response on areas it needs assistance with.
“We have offered support in terms of the way forward. We made that offer to the President. We have made that offer to the Attorney General and Parliamentary Affairs Minister Gail Teixeira. We had several meetings to discuss and we wait for their response. They know what we have offered and we wait for them to let us know if they want us to proceed,” she said.
Nandlall said that government has accepted the offers from the various countries and organizations and has formally replied “accepting and thanking them for it and specific requests have been made in various areas”.
“Certainly legislative reform in the elections area is high on the agenda”, Nandlall said as his office reviews the current laws with the aim that “many of the loopholes, which were exploited during the March 2nd elections and subsequently, will be remedied”.
He added, “we will have to start with the strengthening of the continuous registration system. The law must be made clear that our system of registration is a continuous one and (if after a completed house-to-house registration process) such a system permits a break of the cycle and a complete restart of a house-to-house registration process. Currently, there is great confusion. There is one view that they are mutually exclusive processes and once you have a continuous registration cycle you cannot stop the cycle and start de novo. There is another view that you can have continuous registration and still have house-to-house registration at periodic intervals. Both cannot be correct, this issue has to be addressed and conclusively determined.”
He added: “We have to examine also how the continuous registration is done, is it done in the most effective way? Currently …we are doing this cyclical registration continuously, yet every election, large numbers of persons are left off the list. That issue has to be addressed and we have to find a solution, find out why they are not being caught in the cycle”.
He pointed to the court ruling pertaining to the house-to-house registration in 2019 saying that laws on the issue had to be pellucid.
Acting Chief Justice Roxane George-Wiltshire last year August ruled that the then house-to-house registration exercise being conducted by GECOM was not unconstitutional but she had also cautioned that existing registrants could not just be deleted from the list unless certain criteria are met as provided by law—that being by death or by specified means of disqualification.
“Our courts have clarified that we cannot remove persons on the list on the ground of residency alone. Then, we have to determine also if registration should be a GECOM exercise or should be administered by a different body, institution and the registration role handed to GECOM at a time proximate to elections. We have to have a clear policy on polling places and how they are determined. We had a series of complaints (at the last elections) regarding the shortage of polling places in certain areas and that has to be addressed,” Nandlall contended.
He said that GECOM should also be made by law to publish all statements of poll on a website as early as is reasonably possible.
According to Nandlall, the country has to “have a clear legislative outline of how the votes in each box are verified against the statement of poll; to prevent the use of fraudulent spreadsheets, for example.”
And laws need to be crafted, the Attorney General said, for punishment of electoral offences by officers of GECOM and penalties for them must be harsh to send a message that such crimes will not be tolerated.
“We also need to create a large number of electoral offences with very harsh penalties, directed specifically to elections officers as well as voters and others who aid and abet the commission of these electoral offences or violations of electoral law,” he stressed.
District Four Returning Officer Clairmont Mingo was accused on March 5th of presenting fictitious figures on a spreadsheet and five major observer groups had found his tabulation not to be credible, including the CARICOM observer mission.
On May 6th, GECOM began a recount exercise that showed that the PPP/C had won the majority of votes. However, the credibility of the results determined by the recount has been challenged by APNU+AFC, which has claimed that alleged irregularities that were uncovered compromised the polls. Chief Election Officer Keith Lowenfield is currently facing criminal charges which are alleging fraud and misconduct in his handling of the elections results.
Mingo is also before the courts.
Looking at GECOM itself, Nandlall said that the hiring of staff must also be reviewed “so that the system attracts persons of integrity”.
Staffing, he said, “must also reflect the true demographics of the country; the ethnic demographics of the country”.
“These are some of the issues I have already been looking at but greater care and circumspection will have to be employed and the legislation and other aspects of the elections machinery will have to be scrutinized very carefully,” he added.
