Commentator Ralph Ramkarran yesterday suggested that the ruling PPP/C consider the creation of a new national register by house-to-house registration in order to “eliminate what would be a major source of distraction during the election campaign”.
In his column in yesterday’s Sunday Stabroek, Ramkarran, who is a member of A New and United Guyana (ANUG), also suggested that non-residents who wish to register can be accommodated on a separate list. He said a window of time now exists to start the process which can be closed in a few months.
“The PPP would therefore be distracted during the election campaign by having to explain why the voters’ list is so large in comparison with the resident population. It would therefore be useful to consider the creation of a new national register by house-to-house registration in order to eliminate what would be a major source of distraction during the election campaign,” Ramkarran said in his column yesterday.
Acting Chief Justice Roxane George-Wiltshire had ruled in 2019 on the issue of residency and found that contrary to the contention of the government at the time, it was unlawful to deregister previously registered persons because they were not resident in Guyana at the date of any subsequent registration.
Following a failed attempt to rig the March 2020 general elections, the APNU+AFC has been contending that the voters’ list is bloated with the names of dead and migrated persons and that the only way to move forward is the creation of a fresh list. That would mean embarking on a national house-to-house registration exercise.
Leader of the Opposition Aubrey Norton at one point conceded that the voters’ list used in the 2015 general and regional elections, which saw his party elected to government, was indeed bloated but argued that the present list is far more bloated.
“[The] 2015 list had problems, but it was not as bloated as 2020 and 2025, if it continues like this, will be far more bloated than 2020 [and] 2015 [and] all other lists…let us not forget we [APNU+AFC] believe the list was bloated and though we won 2015 we had begun to clean the list in 2019. So, the question to me is an unfair question in the sense that we had shown from the inception that we will clean the list. We need a clean voters’ list because we believe only a credible list will produce credible results,” Norton had said.
ANUG Chairman Timothy Jonas SC in submitting recommendations for changes to the Representation of the People Act (RoPA) in a letter to Minister of Parliamentary Affairs and Governance, Gail Teixeira noted that before the March 2nd, 2020 general elections and during the subsequent recount much was made by one party of the unreliability of the list of electors. ANUG said that this criticism was not unfounded as many Guyanese migrate and die abroad and their deaths are not recorded here and there is no automatic removal of their names from the list.
“Although this does not impact the efficacy of the election process given the other stringent safeguards which exist to ensure that the person who appears to vote is the same person whose name appears on the list at that place of poll, ANUG recommends that measures should be taken as part of the continuous updating of the list to accommodate this deficiency. Specifically, each Guyanese should have a single number for all administrative (TIN, Driver’s Licence, NIS, Passport) purposes. There should be a single database nationally containing this information. If a person does not transact any business on any forum for a period of seven years (paying monthly or quarterly PAYE or other tax, renewing driver’s licence, obtaining certificate of tax compliance, paying rates, paying monthly NIS or receiving monthly NIS pension), that person should be presumed dead and his/her name removed from the Electoral List, and can of course be restored to the List upon application by that person,” Jonas, who signed the letter, had said.
ANUG is one of three parties holding a joinder seat in Parliament,
According to Ramkarran the size of the voters list became an issue of controversy at the 2020 elections. He noted that the opposition claimed that it was “bloated,” notwithstanding that the APNU+AFC Government could have passed the relevant legislation to prepare a new voters’ list by house-to-house registration if they so wished.
“The propaganda, however, somehow placed the responsibility for the ‘bloated’ list on the PPP with the allegation that for that reason alone, the elections were either tainted, not free and fair, or were rigged. If the opposition is to be believed, the PPP engineered thousands of persons to vote for persons on the voters’ list who were not in Guyana. This claim was debunked by the ‘Report of the Caricom Observer Team for the Recount of Guyana March 02, 2020, Elections’,” Ramkarran said in his column.
He pointed out that the voters’ list has now grown larger. He added that for the 2020 elections the voters’ list had 661,378 names and the population for that year, according to the World Bank, was 797,202. It was pointed out by Ramkarran that Vincent Alexander, a member of the Elections Commission, said that as of 1 March 2024 it contained 706,439 names out of a population of 780,000 (Guyana’s population for 2023 according to the World Bank was 813,834). Alexander has also claimed that the school age population is estimated to be 200,000 and, therefore, the voting population ought to be 580,000. Alexander, Ramkarran said, is of the opinion that the voters’ list has 126,439 more names than it should have.
“Mr Alexander attributed the excess names to be those of non-residents, that is, persons who have migrated or otherwise left Guyana after they have registered. But Mr Alexander knows that non-residents have a right to vote and, consequently, a right to be on the voters’ list! He also knows that the Chief Justice has ruled that they cannot be removed from the list. Why, therefore, the complaint?” Ramkarran questioned.
He pointed out that it was not expected that the opposition would accept a voters’ list of disproportionate size relative to the resident population as fit for the upcoming elections. The opposition, he said, was likely to contend that such a list was “a nefarious plot by the PPP to rig the elections.
“The PNCR has accused the PPP of rigging every election since 1992, (except the elections of 2015 which it won), even though the PPP had no governmental authority for the 1992 and 2020 elections. This pattern is likely to continue in relation to the elections due next year. It does not matter that the opposition would be unable to mount any credible electoral challenge to the PPP because the PNCR is experiencing significant internal distress, and the AFC has become ‘dead meat’ The opposition needs an answer for its failure to achieve past successes – 70 percent of the votes in 1973, 77 percent in 1980 and 78 percent in 1985!”, he wrote.
