The Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) is slated to finally commence discussion on Tuesday on the proposed amendments to the Representation of the People Act (RoPA), weeks after Chairperson retired Justice Claudette Singh made submissions to the government.
The decision was made at Tuesday’s statutory meeting according to Opposition-nominated Commissioner Vincent Alexander.
Alexander said “When we meet again next week [Tuesday] we have decided that meeting will be dedicated to discussing the amendments to RoPA made by the government and offering our own submissions. So when we are finished there will be a GECOM submission to make to the government on the amendments.”
There are three government-nominated Commissioners – Sase Gunraj, Bibi Shadick and Manoj Narayan while Alexander, Charles Corbin and Desmond Trotman were nominated by the Opposition. Shadick has indicated that she made submissions on the amendments already while Gunraj said he will not be making any.
The draft amendments are a result of the attempts to rig the March 2 2020 general and regional elections, which saw a five-month delay between balloting and the declaration of the final results.
As a consequence of the events of the March 2020 elections, several former GECOM officials, including Chief Election Officer (CEO) Keith Lowenfield, Deputy CEO Roxanne Myers, and Region Four Returning Officer Clairmont Mingo, and political party officials were charged with election-related offences.
One of the major changes the government 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.
Among the proposed amendments are the introduction of hefty fines and lengthy jail time for several election-related offences. The fines are in the millions while jail time ranges from three years to life.
The draft amendments were released in November last year and since then the government has been accepting submissions from the public on the proposed changes. Thus far, it has received a number of those submissions and GECOM’s is said to be among the most substantive.
Among the submissions, the GECOM Chair made was the call for the consolidation of the electoral laws as well as amendments to allow for the Chief Election Officer to furnish the Commission with copies of the Statements of Poll (SOPs) to aid it in the declaration and publication of the final results.
This proposed reform is seen as strengthening the role of GECOM in the final declaration. The current legislation appears to make it seem that GECOM is bound to accept the CEO’s final report. This had been an issue in the 2020 elections when the CEO submitted a clearly erroneous report and defied the directions of the Chair.
Chair Singh has already made submissions and the entire Commission met with Attorney General Anil Nandlall last week where they discussed the submissions. The Opposition is adamant that for any electoral reform to be undertaken, then there is a need for legislative changes to deal with dead people on the voters’ list as well as the introduction of biometric technologies to prevent fraudulent voting.
