The controversial 2020 national elections must have been the reason for Guyana scoring a poor rating of 43 out of 100 in the perceptions of electoral integrity conducted by the Electoral Integrity Project, according to its most recent report.
At 43 Guyana is only above Venezuela, Haiti, Honduras and Nicaragua for the countries of the Americas that were assess-ed and has the lowest score for the countries in the Caribbean that were included in the report. The highest ranked Caribbean countries are Jamaica and Barbados who rank at 67 and 66, respectively. Trinidad at 59 is just above the United States which was ranked at 57. Canada leads the Americas with a score of 83.
President Irfaan Ali was sworn in as Guyana 9th President on August 2, 2020, exactly five months after the March 2 elections, which were marred by an attempt to rig the outcome in the favour of the former APNU+AFC.
Ali’s accession to the presidency followed a stalemate that saw an exhaustive recount of ballots overseen by CARICOM and a flurry of legal actions that went all the way to the Caribbean Court of Justice.
According to its report, the Electoral Integrity Project was founded in 2012 and has previously provided worldwide coverage of the quality of elections up to the end of 2018. It said that the new report provides the latest update by covering the period up from 2019 until the end of 2021. It includes “some of the most dramatic moments in the recent history of elections, such as the storming of the US Capitol building in January 2021 and the violence against protestors following the Belarus elections in August 2020”.
It was explained that the dataset is drawn from a rolling survey of 4591 expert assessments of electoral integrity across 480 elections in 169 countries around the world. The cumulative study covers national presidential and parliamentary elections from July 1, 2012 to December 31, 2021.
It also covers three additional years of elections from the previous release, adding 143 national elections in 115 countries, from February 3, 2019 to December 31, 2021.
The report indicated that perceptions of electoral integrity are measured by experts for each country one month after polls close. “Experts are asked to assess the quality of national elections on eleven sub-dimensions: electoral laws; electoral procedures; district boundaries; voter registration; party registration; media coverage; campaign finance; voting process; vote count; results; and electoral authorities. These items sum to an overall Electoral Integrity Index scored from 0 to 100,” the report explained.
According to the report, electoral integrity remains the highest in Nordic countries, Finland, Sweden, and Denmark, while regional disparity remains in electoral integrity, with some of the lowest scores found in Africa and Asia.
And although electoral integrity continued to be generally higher in countries with much higher levels of economic development, quality elections were still delivered in lower-income countries, such as Cape Verde, which had the highest ranked elections in Africa.
Further, it was pointed out that electoral finance remains the weakest area of the electoral cycle. “The publishing of transparent financial accounts was the lowest sub-component. This demonstrates a need across the board for policymakers, candidates, and electoral authorities to improve reporting mechanisms to allow for maximum transparency in the use of money in elections,” the report recommended.
Meanwhile, it stated that the areas of the electoral cycle that are strongest are the vote counting and electoral procedures while, according to the report, there is little evidence for an aggregate decline in the quality of electoral integrity globally between 2012-2021, albeit with some large decreases in specific countries, with more incremental increases in others.
