Over five months after Opposition-nominated GECOM Commissioners Vincent Alexander, Charles Corbin and Desmond Trotman proposed that an internal investigation be launched into the events of the March 2020 general and regional elections, Chair, retired Justice Claudette Singh has finally ruled against the proposal.
The Opposition team submitted the proposal on February 03, 2022.
Alexander had said that the proposals form part of their contribution to the proposed amendments to the Representation of the People Act (RoPA).
“GECOM is in no position to objectively contribute to the process of amending RoPA in the absence of an internal investigation of the 2020 elections to determine what are the manifested weaknesses of its system and operations,” the opposition-nominated Commissioners had said in their proposal to the Commission.
Yesterday, both Alexander and government-nominated commissioner Sase Gunraj said that the Chair decided against the proposal to review.
“The Chair gave a decision on the call for a review and said that the review can only form part of a report from the CEO and that is what the review has to be. [She said] it cannot occupy the space intended for the courts. We were not asking for anything that has to do with judicial review, we were asking for a review dealing with our processes and systems which had to be reviewed in its entirety. You can’t review it abstractly, you have to review to determine where there are faults and how we can prevent reoccurrences,” Alexander said.
He added that the Opposition Commissioners have since reserved the right to table a response at some later date.
Additionally, they had called for the cleansing of the voters` list noting that it has been a persistent demand of major stakeholders and should be addressed.
“In that regard, the judgment in relation to House-to-House Registration should be clarified from the standpoint of its applicability to the voters` list as distinct from the Register of Registrants. In like manner, relatedly or separately, the relevance and application of Regulation 40 of the National Registration Act should be determined,” the proposal added.
The trio further stated that a mechanism to provide for the cleansing of the voters` list has to be integral to any amendment of the electoral laws. They added that the mere fact that there is no mechanism to ensure that a registrant who dies overseas can be removed from the voters` list is sufficient reason to warrant such a mechanism.
In that regard, Alexander said that Justice Singh reserved the right to a decision since a Commissioner was absent.
“The voters’ list and how do we deal with the issues of the list, the discussions were inconclusive because one Commissioner was absent and in some regards, the decision was deferred to when we have a full Commission,” he said.
When the Opposition’s proposal was tabled, the Commission agreed to the internal investigation but did not agree on when the process should commence. It is unclear what led to the Chair’s decision to move away from the agreement.
Back in March, the APNU+AFC met virtually with GECOM where it said that Guyana’s electoral system is in desperate need of significant reforms and urged the GECOM not to hold elections until before.
