General and Regional Elections 2025: Jagdeo criticises Opposition Leader for disrupting voting process in Sophia

…slams Opposition for “magnifying minor issues”

General Secretary (GS) of the incumbent People’s Progressive Party (PPP) Dr Bharrat Jagdeo, has condemned the opposition parties that contested General and Regional Elections for magnifying minor issues during Monday’s polling day activities. Speaking with reporters after casting his ballot at the St Paul’s Primary School at Plaisance, East Coast Demerara (ECD) early Monday afternoon, Jagdeo noted, “There are several reports that are not unusual on polling day and I do not want to elevate them to intractable problems. The other political parties, their leaders are magnifying minor issues.” Among the issues he cited were stamps not working, sloth of the voting process at some polling places.

According to Jagdeo, who is also the country’s Vice President (VP), “these are normal things that happen around election day… and so far, all of those matters have been addressed promptly by GECOM (Guyana Elections Commission), whenever they come up or they’re identified.” One specific incident that he identified with an opposition party is Leader and Presidential Candidate of the A Partnership for National Unity (APNU), Aubrey Norton, who complained about the layout inside some of the polling stations. In fact, after casting his ballot at the opening of polls at the Plaisance Secondary School Monday morning, Norton told reporters that he had objected to the placement of the voting booths.
“The law says that the scrutineers must see the body of the persons voting, though, they mustn’t be able to [see who they voted for]. Expect for one of the [polling stations] all the rest were wrong so I had them changed,” he noted.

The APNU Leader said he would let the party’s Chief Scrutineer issue a notice to inform their polling agents to stop the voting process if they cannot see the persons’ full body. Norton ended raising similar concerns later that morning at other polling stations in Sophia, Georgetown, where he had a confrontation with PPP candidate, Susan Rodrigues, who served as Minister within the Housing and Water Ministry in the incumbent PPP/C Administration. In videos circulating online, Rodrigues was seen indicating that her party is satisfied with the positioning of the voting compartment, stressing that “the voter is entitled to privacy.”
She went onto tell the APNU Presidential Candidate that he cannot disrupt the voting process and reminded him that GECOM is the entity that is conducting these elections, to which Norton responded, “You cannot tell me what to do.”
However, Chief Elections Officer (CEO) at GECOM, Vishnu Persaud has already made it clear that no representatives of any political parties have the power to stop the operations of a polling station. “The operations of polling stations are GECOM’s responsibility, not that of any political stakeholder. No stakeholder has any authority to stop the operations of a polling station,” Persaud had declared at a press conference last week. He was at the time responding to an incident that occurred on the August 22 Disciplined Services Day when APNU’s Chief Scrutineer, Carol Smith-Joseph, who disrupted the voting process at a polling station located in the Guyana Defence Force’s (GDF) Base Camp Ayanganna headquarters.
Smith-Joseph, who is currently facing electoral fraud charges stemming from the 2020 national generals had argued that the positioning of the voting compartments prevented her from monitoring whether voters were using cellphones – a similar concern Norton shared on Monday’s E-Day activities. GECOM has banned the use of cellphones to prevent persons from taking photos of their ballot papers, putting systems in place at each polling stations for voters to lodge their devices nearby before going behind/into the voting compartments to cast their ballots.
At a pre-election press briefing on Sunday, CEO Persaud had explained that while GECOM does not have powers to arrest anyone found breaching this no cellphone rule, its staff at the polling station will be taking the information of those persons who do this and hand them over the Guyana Police Force (GPF) for further actions at a later date. Meanwhile, addressing the actions of the APNU Leader, Jagdeo told reporters that the APNU leader should not have disrupted the process but, unlike the opposition party, the PPP/C would not make this a major issue of this matter. “There was an issue in Sophia when the Leader of the Opposition showed up there and was trying, personally, to rearrange the furniture in the polling place. GECOM addressed that matter so we chose not to elevate it into anything major. But he should not have done that,” the PPP GS contended. On the other hand, at least one international observer group, the Organisation of American States (OAS), that is in Guyana to monitor the elections, has raised this issue of the voting compartment layout. Head of the OAS Electoral Observation Mission, Bruce Golding, related that in some polling stations, persons were being completely blocked behind the voting compartments while others were situated to give a clear view of the voter.
“I don’t blame that on the Presiding Officers (PO). There seems to have been some lack of clarity in the instructions that they were given… I gather it was in relation to this effort to prevent voters from photographing their ballots,” Golding stated.

GECOM
At a press conference on Monday evening, GECOM’s Public Relations Officer Yolanda Ward underscored the importance of positioning the voting compartments to protect voters’ secrecy.
Noting that POs were empowered to address such matters, Ward noted, “…where these matters were brought to the attention of our operations team, they were immediately addressed to the satisfaction of the Candidates and Agents of those respective Polling Stations.”