Dear Editor.
Based on ample international evidence, I do not share Ralph Ramkarran’s bleak pessimism in his recent article in Conversation Tree, titled “Biometrics are not permitted by the constitution or any other law”, where he lamented that election losers in Guyana (in his narrative, the PNCR alone) will engage in “an unending political dance over the electoral system based on nothing more than political calculations and posturing.”
Before explaining my optimism why elections in Guyana can be made credible enough to be accepted by all contesting parties, I wish to remind Mr Ramkarran that when the PPP lost the 2015 election, it engaged in much of his political dancing. It filed an election petition in the High Court challenging the validity of the results and unleashed a bitter barrage of criticisms against GECOM and the election winner. Then PPP GECOM commissioner Robeson Benn, at a news conference at Freedom House, accused GECOM of being unable “to deliver free, fair, transparent elections to the people of Guyana” and of consorting “with those efforts which put the May 2015 elections in grave doubts and lend credence to major stakeholders claims of rigging and fraud at those polls.”
A few months later, in October 2015, the PPP called for eight sweeping electoral reforms to be placed on the front burner including a new voters list based on house to house enumeration, improved biometrics, electronic voting (in other words, an end to paper ballots), and for then Chairman of GECOM Steve Surujbally to go (sounds familiar?) All this political dancing, Mr Ramkarran, as if the PNCR or the Coalition is not supposed to win an election in Guyana!
Now to my optimism. Several countries in the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia have shown that disputed election results can become a thing of the past once certain conditions are met and maintained. The three most critical conditions seem to be: (i) the use of, and the willingness to use, state-of-the-art registration and voting technology, (ii) an elections commission chair who is impartial, mission-oriented, with good consensus-building skills, and (iii) an elections commission with strong administrative governance and a confidence-building public communications strategy. In these regards, Jamaica comes to mind as likely the most successful case. From 2002, just five years after its 1997 election, one of the most contentious and violence-ridden elections ever in Jamaica, the country has managed to conduct fairly peaceful elections, the results of which all political contenders have accepted. For more texture, let us add that, in 2003, Jamaica’s Director of Elections Danville Walker received the prestigious Gleaner Man of the Year Award for presiding over elections deemed “the cleanest in the Country’s history.” Jamaica from 2007 started to use automated fingerprint biometric verification and other information technologies. The integrity and credibility of Jamaica elections have evolved to the point where not only do parties accept the declared results, but public confidence in the elections is high, and there has been a marked drop in interest within the international electoral observation community in monitoring elections in Jamaica.
The Jamaican and experience elsewhere have shown that a point could be reached in the management of elections where a losing political party has no more rational, political and moral space to engage in “unending political dance” over declared election results. Indeed, much of the management of elections in developing societies is mostly driven by the belief that this goal could be achieved. However, as Ghana has shown, with its low public trust in its elections commission, massive investments in digital biometrics systems alone are not enough.
If GECOM can do half as well as the election commission of Jamaica, disputed elections in Guyana can become history. With proper reforms (and a serious and visionary GECOM Chair), it can.