Govt Commissioner’s walk-out breaks up GECOM meeting

As preparations continue for the upcoming General and Regional Elections, another meeting of the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) ended abruptly on Tuesday after one of the Commissioners walked out.
This was the first meeting of the seven-member Commission for 2020. The last meeting was held in December 2019.

Guyana Times understands that at the beginning of the meeting, Government-nominated Commissioner Charles Corbin asked to leave the meeting early and this was granted. However, less than an hour after he left, his fellow Government-nominated Commissioner, Desmond Trotman, had a disagreement with another Commissioner and left the meeting.
This forced Tuesday’s meeting to come to an abrupt end.
Following the meeting, Opposition-nominated Commissioner Sase Gunraj would only say that the meeting did not go to conclusion because “we lost a quorum”.
Nevertheless, he related that they were able to discuss the interactions and assistance GECOM will be getting from overseas partners as well as preparations and procedures for the upcoming Nominations Day on Friday.
GECOM has reported that at least 19 political parties, 14 of which are new parties, have submitted their symbols to contest the March 2, 2020 General and Regional Elections.
On December 27, 2019, the seven-member Elections Commission met with President David Granger and briefed him on GECOM’s state of preparedness.
Following that high-level meeting, Opposition-nominated Commissioner Bibi Shadick explained that GECOM is on track with activities for the upcoming polls and that the Elections Secretariat has sufficient funding for the entire process.
Government would have approved over $8 billion for the hosting of the 2020 elections, a large fraction of which still remains unused.
“Just to ensure whether we’re on track with elections, and we are. We have money but we just wanted to make sure that the Finance Minister will give the money when we ask for it in a timely manner,” Shadick had explained.
However, Government-nominated Commissioner Vincent Alexander had acknowledged that the availability of these resources will not be an issue.
“We’re advised by the executives that, that should not be a problem,” he had indicated after the engagement with the Head of State.
Over the past months, the Elections Commission has been meeting and despite several meetings, it is yet to find consensus on finalising the voters’ list, particularly the use of the unverified data that was captured during the scrapped House-to-House Registration exercise.
Last month, it was announced that over 6500 persons of the 16,863 ‘new’ registrants were not confirmed during the five-day field verification exercise.
Figures released to the media showed that Region Four (Demerara-Mahaica) had the highest number of unconfirmed persons, which tallied to 3657.
According to GECOM, there were 16,863 ‘new’ registrants but only 10,329 were confirmed.
In fact, one Opposition-nominated Commissioner had told this publication that field officers who conducted the verification exercise of “new registrants” had found empty lots at the addresses on record for those persons.