Even though the questions on the size of the Official Voters List (OLE) have been addressed time and again, after it was announced that the OLE for the upcoming Sept 1st elections is 757,690 electors, it remains an opposition issue with only one week to go. The assertion by the Carter Centre that they have not found any signs of “bloating” has not stopped the sniping. Only a few days ago, opposition-nominated Commissioner Vincent Alexander and the presidential candidate of the party that is trying to delay the holding of the election by another artifice in the courts have alleged the list is deliberately kept bloated so as to facilitate rigging by the incumbent party in Government.
The Commissioner was quoted as asserting, “…we have evidence of the fact that that list is deficient, and they are persons whose names are on the list who would have died years ago. Thousands of overseas dead are on the list.” Yet the single name of a “dead” person he alluded to, which had been cited in the media, has been conclusively proven to be false. He scoffed at GECOM’s position that any anomalies in the list can be rectified during the “claims and objections” (C&O) period before the list is declared to be “official”. He himself should be asked to present the “evidence” he claims he has in his possession.
During this year’s C&O period, Leader of the Opposition Aubrey Norton said his party would not proffer any objections. “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 aren’t stupid…” Such postures work to fundamentally undermine our democratic system of governance and must be condemned.
The opposition’s claim is that for a country with a population of 786,000, the 757,690 voters who must be eighteen and over is out of whack. They disingenuously ignore a host of factors, the first being the population cited is from the 2012 census, and a fairer comparison can be drawn from the 2020 OLE, which contained 661,378 names. In addition to the natural increase in the population, there has been a huge influx of returning Guyanese from Venezuela who would have since registered.
Additionally, our 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 they are not 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 pursuant to 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, do 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, has a high ratio of registered voters compared with their resident population. For Barbados and St Vincent the percentage is 89 per cent, and for St Lucia it is 95 per cent.
The Opposition studiously and disingenuously ignore the many safeguards that were built into the electoral system to prevent voters’ 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.
Sadly, the continued questioning of the OLE by the Opposition can only be understood as preparing the ground for questioning the legitimacy of the next PPP Government.
