–Amna Ally declares after hours-long meeting with GECOM officials
…to inform President of stalemate
“GUYANA Elections Commission (GECOM cannot) be ready for the next 50-days,” Government Chief Whip Amna Ally said, while noting that she will be telling President David Granger about the stalemate that occurred in the aftermath of Friday’s meeting at the electoral body.
Ally, who is also minister of social protection and general -secretary of the People’s National Congress Reform and Teixeira were mandated to meet with GECOM to ascertain its readiness to hold early elections. However, much like what happened on Thursday when the commissioners met, on Friday the GECOM officials were unable to come to a consensus on exactly how much time it needs to prepare for General and Regional Elections. “The chairman had to terminate the meeting because it was going nowhere as far as I am concerned,” Ally told media operatives after the meeting at GECOM’s Kingston, Georgetown headquarters.
She said that the PPP’s representatives are giving a timeline to suit a 90-day period, but both GECOM and the coalition-nominated commissioners do not see it as being feasible within that time span. Adding that GECOM has to train people to work for elections, Ally said this will take a lot of time that may last several months.
Meanwhile, Teixeira said after the meeting , the GECOM chairman appears to be unwilling to come to a definitive conclusion on the issue of elections. She explained that Guyana’s constitution makes it clear that after a no-confidence motion is passed, the President and Cabinet must resign and general elections must be held in 90 days. Government is currently challenging the outcome of the vote in the High Court.
Underscoring at the meeting that the GECOM will be held responsible for putting Guyana in a constitutional crisis, Teixeira said the election body wants a house-to- house registration which would take eight months to a year. “It would be unthinkable to expect that the opposition would give a two-thirds majority to such an extension, when there is a no-confidence motion that has been passed in the National Assembly, and that is when the meeting broke up,” Teixeira said.
Asserting that there are about 54 days left before the constitutionally appointed date for elections, Teixeira said she asked the commission if it was not possible to operate on simultaneous tracks whereby procurement, ballot papers, training and extracting persons who are dead and eligible to vote on the list can be done.
“The commission did not answer that, except that CEO Keith Lowenfield had some concerns about the training; we are convinced that the commission trained approximately 10, 000 people for Local Government Elections. We can use 7,500 and therefore we do not believe it’s impossible from that 10,000 pool plus an additional 2,000 persons being trained to work as temporary electoral staff,” she explained.
She opined that Lowenfield is being forced not to give any dates pertaining to the hosting of elections. The PPP chief whip said after three meetings with GECOM nothing has been decided and “persons are trying to find all sorts of reasons and justifications that the elections would not be held within the 90 days but could very well be way past that, aiming for a house- to- house registration.”
On Thursday, following a meeting of the commission, Commissioner Vincent Alexander speaking with the media, said that the PPP-nominated commissioners seem to have forgotten that the very constitution which stipulates the 90-day period makes provision for necessary adjustments. Asked to speak on the basis of his experience in the work on the average time such could take, he said: “GECOM itself in the past has discussed and enunciated on the question of a timeframe for unscheduled elections and that, which is in our records, was 180 days.”
Alexander said Lowenfield had objected and warned against rapid preparation methods. “The CEO clearly said that the time is insufficient if you want to hold the elections in March, which is what they are calling for now. He’s saying that you really want to create a situation to prove the incompetence of GECOM by mandating us to do something that is undoable…to train people to be prepared for an election in March,” he said.
The commissioners also disagreed on whether a claims- and- objections period should be held before the list is verified as fit for an election. “Act No. 15 of 2000 mandates that the claims and objections period ought to be held to refresh or give life to the list. Never, in 2001, 2006, 2011, 2015, 2016 and 2018 when we contemplated the holding of elections, was there an active list that we have now. I say all of that to say to you that there’s not a legal requirement for any sort of refreshing of the list in terms of house-to-house registration; in terms of claims and objections; in terms of continuous registration. We have an active list,” Sase Gunraj, another PPP-nominated commissioner, said.
However, Alexander had maintained that while house-to-house registration is still a viable option, at minimum, the other commissioners are pushing for there to be a claims- and- objections period for the cleansing of the list. “If one looks to the petition of the PPP to which Commissioner Bibi Shadick was a participant, they said that people have impersonated voters who were on the list. This says that we have accepted that the list is flawed, but now they are unprepared to go to an election with a claims and objections –at minimum – which allows for some cleansing of the list,” Alexander said.
