ANYONE CAN CHECK THE VOTERS’ LIST
August 19, 2014, By KNews, Filed Under Features/Columnists, Peeping Tom, Source - Kaieteur News
GECOM should never have indicated that the Preliminary Voters’ List that it has produced is above board. Not without a verification exercise and not in Guyana, and not against the history of voter padding and electoral rigging that took place under the PNC regime.
In the 1968 elections, there was extensive padding of the overseas voters’ list. But the PNC did not need to rig the elections using overseas votes. There were other widespread voting irregularities including voting by persons who were long dead.
The elections of 1973, 1980, 1985 and the referendum of 1978 were all characterized by massive fraud and deceit. These elections were held under the PNC.
The PPP and the people of Guyana therefore, have to be extremely vigilant against the possibility of large scale electoral padding taking place. The PPP should conduct its own house-to-house verification of the voters’ list so as to ensure that there are no phantoms registered. It should also guard against multiple voter registrations. The use of fingerprint technology would be an important tool to weed out duplicate and triplicate registrations.
Guyana’s reputation is on the line. It is important that the forthcoming elections are certified once again by the international community as being fair. It is necessary that there is no rigging of votes or padding of the voters’ list. That would once again turn Guyana into a pariah state where democracy is concerned.
Such a label will hurt Guyana’s image and its economy even further. It is therefore important that all national stakeholders, including the private sector, be engaged in verification of the Preliminary Voters’ List. Such an exercise will allow Guyana to show the external world that long gone are the days of dubious elections. It will demonstrate that Guyana is a maturing democracy which has finally laid to rest charges of voter rigging and voter padding, which characterized elections in the past.
The key to a fair election is a sanitized voters’ list. The best way to sanitize the list is to undertake verification. Anyone can verify the voters’ list. One does not need to be accredited by GECOM or indeed any political party to conduct verification checks on the voters’ list. So there should be no alarm bells about persons outside of GECOM going around to the various communities and checking the voters’ list.
What should be alarming is if those persons represent that they are from GECOM when they are not. But no one needs to be accredited to conduct house-to-house verification of the voters’ list.
This time around the PPP has obviously been doing its homework. It has reported that it found one house in which eighteen persons were registered, but could not locate seventeen of these individuals.
Well that is not a problem. Not finding seventeen persons does not disqualify them from being registered. The problem is if they do not exist or are registered in other districts. But it is highly unusual for eighteen persons to be registered at one address and only one can be found during verification.
GECOM cannot simply dismiss such claims by the PPP. GECOM has to understand the level of suspicion that plagues our elections, and it should spare no effort in addressing concerns of possible voter padding. We have a great many dishonest individuals in this society who would do all manner of things just to secure advantages in elections.
Even though there is a Claims and Objections process, GECOM undertakes a validation of its Preliminary Voters’ List. This does not require that GECOM go to every house.
What GECOM should do is to undertake a representative sample of the Preliminary Voters’ List and undertake checks of this sample. While a sample of five hundred would be enough for a population like Guyana, in order to please the various political parties, the same should be around 2,000. From this sample, GECOM would be able to determine whether there is any padding of the voters’ list.
House-to-house verification should however, be undertaken by the political parties, civil society groupings and the business community. With only about four hundred thousand expected voters at the most, it should. If everyone combines their efforts, there can be house-to-house verification conducted in record time. This would satisfy all concerned. The private sector should lead this exercise and have the various parties appoint observers to the process. GECOM should make the Preliminary Voters’ List available online to aid in this process.
Guyana has to firmly and finally put behind it, the ghosts of voting irregularities. And the best way of doing so is by first ensuring that we have a credible and accurate voters’ list, one that is beyond reproach.
Source -- http://www.kaieteurnewsonline....eck-the-voters-list/
