From the moment the APNU/AFC coalition had to bow to international condemnation – five months after their outrageous attempt to rig the March 2, 2020 elections – and accept their electoral defeat, they launched a desperate two-pronged campaign that fundamentally worked to undermine our democratic system of governance. The first prong was to try delegitimizing the PPP government by claiming it was “illegally installed” through “regime change” imposed by the US. They ignored that the condemnation was loudest from our Caricom sisters and brothers, led by one of the champions of the developing world, PM Mia Mottley of Barbados. International observation of elections is now an accepted component of democratic governance.
The second prong is to claim the PPP had rigged the elections while they were in Opposition, by manipulating what they insisted were “weaknesses” in the electoral system. While not stressing the “illegally installed regime” trope – and have been assiduously courting members of the US Administration to intervene on their behalf – they have ratcheted up their rhetoric on the electoral system, honing in on the voters list, which they dub as “inflated with dead people”. For years, they have been protesting every Tuesday during lunch hours in front of GECOM Headquarters for the voters list to be “sanitized”.
Their main objection is that for a country with a population of 786,000, the 2020 voters’ list was out of whack at 661,378 or 84 per cent. They exploit the seemingly plausible claim that 84% of our populace cannot satisfy our requirement that voters be Guyanese over 18 years of age. What they ignore is that the law declares that once a Guyanese is on the National Register of Registrants (NRR) – from which the OLE is extracted – he or she cannot be removed merely because of not being resident in Guyana, but only if they are deceased or declared mentally incompetent. As the Chief Justice ruled in 2019, “residency is not an additional qualifying requirement for registration under Article 159 (2) (c) of the Constitution of Guyana.” This decision was reaffirmed unanimously by the Court of Appeal the following year.
This requirement, of course, can be inserted by suitably amending the Constitution, which would necessitate the Opposition voting along with the Government on such a measure. The Opposition, however, does not want to alienate overseas Guyanese, who are their main funders, and want to retain their full rights as Guyanese.
But in the Caribbean, Guyana is not unique in allowing citizens who are foreign residents the right to vote; and consequently, along with high migration rates, have a high ratio of registered voters compared with their resident population. For Barbados and St Vincent, the percentage is 89%; and for St Lucia, it is 95%. Preliminary figures suggest that our ratio might also rise with the release of the 2022 census and the new official list of electors, which as of last April, had risen to 718,715, with some 1018 deceased to be removed. The recent announcement that the OLE would be one of the databases for citizens to qualify for the $100,000 grant has encouraged many unregistered citizens to get registered, and that will increase the number on the OLE.
The Opposition studiously and disingenuously ignored the many safeguards that were built into the electoral system to prevent voter fraud after free and fair elections were returned following 28 years of PNC rigging. For instance, each party contesting elections can nominate “party scrutineers” at each polling booth to verify from the photograph on the National ID Cards presented that a voter is who he or she claims to be, because they have a separate photograph of the person available to them. The Opposition is also now demanding other “biometric” identification, including fingerprints for voters, and while the Government accepts these may improve reliability, they are not electoral panaceas, and time is against their adoption for the 2025 elections.
But based on the history of the PNC and elections rigging, their demands for “reform” are the occasion for the war to arrogate power, not the cause.
