Dear Editor,
Your Monday’s editorial “Keep voting as simple as possible” suffers in two regards: (i) it apparently did not research the experiences of countries where electronic fingerprint voting is practised. One such country is Peru. The country is 6 times larger than Guyana and has over 19m voters. Its elections constitute a successful case study since the technology was introduced in 2011.
Much longer in experience is Jamaica, which also uses an Electro-nic Voter Identification System (EVIS) to identify and verify registered electors at the polling station by using their fingerprints. I personally witnessed at several polling stations the ease with which this technology is used as a member of the Carter Center Elections Observer Mission to the 2002 Jamaica elections. That was over 20 years ago!
The voting devices are battery-operated (with spares, one can assume) and therefore need no power from the national grid. So, the editorial’s concerns about GPL blackouts are misplaced. Training requirements for polling place staff are minimal. (ii) The editorial also fails to recognize that any serious election commission must continuously work to improve the credibility, efficiency, and accuracy of elections. In other words, on these scores, every succeeding election must be better than the previous one. In this regard, what has GECOM done since March 2020, despite the best efforts of the Opposition-nominated Commissioners? So, yes, keeping voting as simple as possible must indeed be a goal of the election process. But so too are accuracy and integrity.
Sincerely,
Sherwood Lowe
