Minister of Parliamentary Affairs and Governance, Gail Teixeira has officially written to the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) requesting their input on the proposed amendments to the Representation of the People Act (RoPA).
“We got, belatedly, a correspondence from Minister Teixeira asking us to respond to the amendments of RoPA,” GECOM Commissioner Vincent Alexander related to Stabroek News on Tuesday.
He added that they discussed the letter at Tuesday’s statutory meeting but could not say whether they are going to respond as a collective or individually.
Additionally, government-nominated Commissioner Sase Gunraj told this newspaper that while the issue was discussed at the level of the Commission, they have decided to review the records of previous discussions, concerning ROPA, before a decision is taken to respond.
“There was no decision whether individual or collective responses. There was some suggestion to find records of previous discussions we have had at the Commission and sub-committee level to find what the changes we had wanted for RoPA were. That was as much as we had discussed on that,” he explained.
The issue of responding will come up again when the Commission meets on Tuesday.
The government released the proposed amendments to RoPA earlier this month following a commitment from President Irfaan Ali. The draft amendments are a result of the debacle at the March 2020 general and regional elections which lasted exactly five months between balloting and the declaration of the final results. That was due to a series of twists and turns including several court challenges, reaching the highest Appellate Court – the Caribbean Court of Justice, moves to declare unverified results and a national recount of all ballots.
As a consequence of the events of the March 2020 elections, several former GECOM officials, including its Chief Election Officer Keith Lowenfield, Deputy CEO Roxanne Myers, and Region Four (Demerara-Mahaica) Returning Officer Clairmont Mingo, and political party officials were charged with election-related offences.
Among the draft amendments to RoPA are hefty fines and life imprisonment for election-related offences.
The draft amendment proposes that once the CEO receives the tabulation forms from each electoral district, then they must immediately post them to the Commission’s website and failure to do so or if incorrect documents are posted would see them being liable to a fine of $10 million and life in prison. The document also states that the CEO shall, within 12 hours of the calculation of the results, prepare his report for the commission to declare and publish the results of the election.
“The Chief Election Officer commits an offence if he (a) fails to calculate the total number of votes on the basis of information contained in the District Tabulation Forms, as required by subsection (1); (b) prepares the report, required under subsection (2), with falsified information; or (c) fails to prepare the report required under subsection (2) or fails to prepare the report within the time specified under subsection (2), and is liable on summary conviction to a fine of ten million dollars and to imprisonment for life,” it states.
One of the major changes it proposes is the division of Region Four, the country’s largest electoral district, into four sub-districts – East Bank Demerara, East Coast Demerara, North Georgetown and South Georgetown – effectively adding a new section to Section 6 of ROPA, which deals with polling districts and divisions.
That amendment has received criticisms from political activists and other groups. However, the government has defended it.
“District Four is a special district in the electoral equation of our country. It is the most populated district [and] it always has the greatest number of controversies. So, what we are proposing in these amendments, is we’re subdividing it into four units; the East Bank, the East Coast, North Georgetown, South Georgetown,” Attorney General Anil Nandlall was quoted as saying by the Department of Public Information (DPI).
