After failing to challenge claimed ‘bloated’ voters’ List: Opposition Leader now claims APNU not submitting objections since it will benefit PPP

Opposition Leader, Aubrey Norton, on Friday, said that his political party refrained from filing any objections during Guyana’s Elections Commission (GECOM) last Claims and Objections exercise because providing evidence to back their own claims of a bloated voters’ list would benefit the People’s Progressive Party Civic (PPP/C).
Norton made the statement during his party’s weekly virtual press conference.
Earlier this week it was reported that during GECOM’s first Claims and Objections exercise for the year only nine objections were received during the period from January 2 – 22. Of the nine, none were filed by any of the opposition parties, including the party that Norton leads, the People’s National Congress Reform (PNC/R). Given Norton’s sustained public complaints about issues with the voters’ list, he was questioned on why his party did not submit any official objections to GECOM. Norton indicated that lodging official objections with GECOM is counterproductive.

“To do that is to help the People’s Progressive Party. We are not going to do that,” Norton offered.
“Any actions now will help the PPP, by saying that, you will not be able to take off the thousands and then they claim that they clean the list. We ain’t stupid… we have common sense. They’re trying to get us to do Claims and Objections so that they can spin it politically.”
Political opposition parties continue to complain about the Official List of Elector (OLE), and calls for the removal of voters notwithstanding legal ramifications.  Over the years the opposition has made a number of claims, including that of dead and migrated persons voting.
As Guyana gets ready for elections in 2025, the opposition has heightened their calls for the scrapping of the OLE and the National Register of Registrants (NRR) from which GECOM extracts the OLE. This is notwithstanding GECOM having made it categorically clear that constitutional reform would be needed before GECOM could act on any such suggestions. In 2019, Chief Justice Roxanne George ruled that names cannot be removed from the NRR except in the case of death.
Last week, Vice President Dr Bharrat Jagdeo in responding to the Opposition’s repeated claims about the integrity of the voters’ list, said that the registration process was rigorous and carefully monitored, highlighting that once a person is registered, their name can only be removed in the event of death. He dismissed the Opposition’s argument that persons who have migrated should be removed from the list.