Getting proof of dead or illegal voters on the OLE insurmountable – Opposition MP

General Secretary of the People’s National Congress Reform (PNCR), Sherwyn Benjamin, on Friday, declared that it would be an “insurmountable difficulty” for the party to be able to procure evidence of dead voters being on the Official List of Electors (OLE).
Mr Benjamin made the remarks during his party’s weekly virtual press conference, where he responded to remarks made by Attorney General (AG), Anil Nandalall, who had questioned the PNCR’s lack of submission of objections during the Guyana Election Commission (GECOM) recent Claims and Objections exercise in January.

During GECOM’s first Claims and Objections exercise for the year, only nine objections were received during the period from January 2 – 22, of which, none were filed by any of the opposition parties.
This raised eyebrows, given the opposition’s sustained position that the voters list contains dead and illegal voters.
On Friday, Benjamin admitted that given that the party would have to produce evidence to back any objections they made, the task was too insurmountable.
“The burden of proof however, requires the objector to provide documentary evidence of the death or fraud. How then does Mr Nandalall expect the death certificates of Guyanese who have died locally, and especially those overseas to be easily obtained or at all. He is not aware, he is not unaware of this insurmountable difficulty,” Benjamin explained.
Benjamin added that, notwithstanding the lack of evidence, it was in the party’s better interest to instead focus on their call for biometrics, and continue to simply advocate for a clean voters list.
“Our case for biometrics and a clean voters list is far more substantial,” Benjamin reasoned.
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 Roxane George ruled that names cannot be removed from the NRR except in the case of death.