A date for the start of new national house-to-house registration has not been confirmed, according to Opposition- nominated Commissioner on the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM), Bibi Shadick. “In all the circles, everybody is not agreeing with each other. There are doubts. I know they are going ahead and saying they are training people, but there are doubts…GECOM is a constitutional body…we have to follow the law…GECOM does not make its own laws,” she said, during a recently televised programme ‘This Week in 60 Minutes’.
Shadick contends that GECOM’s posture on the push for new national house-to- house registration was led by the People’s National Congress Reform (PNCR) General Secretary, Amna Ally. She said, “When she (Amna Ally) came to the Commission to talk with GECOM – after our March 2019 meeting with the President – that was the first place that house-to-house registration was mentioned, so it became a national rallying cry after that. GECOM is talking about house-to-house registration as a policy of GECOM, not as the law of the country and that is where the problem is between the three Opposition-nominated GECOM Commissioners and the others.”
The Opposition-nominated GECOM Commissioner made the distinction between house to house visits – where GECOM visits homes to ensure that eligible voters are on the list – and house-to- house registration where GECOM recreates an entirely new List of Electors from scratch. She said, “House-to-house registration is a good thing to add people to the list, but it a bad thing when you are using it to wipe out a whole national Register of Registrants. That is the aim of this current exercise. That is not something that you do.”
POLICY MUST CONFORM WITH LAWS
She explained that GECOM can make policy, but this must correspond to the laws of Guyana. According to her, the reasons proffered to advance new national house-to-house registration, including claims that the List of Electors is bloated, do not hold water.
She said, “GECOM has a process, during claims and objections period for persons who died to be taken off the list…there is a process…they are saying too that there are people on the List who live overseas, but what is stopping Guyanese from living overseas? What is stopping Guyanese from getting a job in Tortola or on a cruise ship? Or in Barbados to teach? And come back to Guyana. Which law stops Guyanese from doing that? They are saying that there are people who do not live here, but you can’t take somebody’s name off the List who is a legitimate citizen. I cannot understand someone who gets a job overseas and is registered as a voter and will come home one day and find their name off the List of Electors.”
Shadick stated that the law is clear on this issue. “As a result of what they want to do, Guyanese who have not been living here for whatever period of time, for work of whatever other reason, will be taken off the list….that is unconstitutional thing.”
Relative to the Legal Opinion by GECOM’s Legal Officer, Excellence Dazzell, who advised against a new national house-to-house registration, Shadick said, “What the Legal Officer did was quote the law. That is the law…what is so ironic is that we went through a whole set of discussions and all kinds of recommendations to make sure that every day of the year GECOM will have a valid list of Electors, in the case that there is a need for by-elections or anything else….the legislation was passed to say we will have a valid List of Electors every day of the year.”
The legal opinion points out that: “The use of the work ‘revise’ [in the Election Laws (Amendment) Act 15 of 2000] suggest that the process is not one where a ‘new’ List is generated, but one where the most recent list is updated or amended. “….I therefore advise that procedures be put in place to ensure the revision of the list, otherwise the Commission would be acting in defiance of the law and may prejudice aby by-election that may become necessary.”
TIMELINES
On the question of how long a new national house-to-house registration would take, if it is advanced by the Coalition Government- aligned elements at GECOM, despite the objections of the Parliamentary Opposition, Shadick was clear that it would take at minimum nine months.
“I am not talking about wiping out a whole national Register of Registrants, I am taking about GECOM going to each home in Guyana and making sure each voter in on the Voters’ List. That process in this country cannot take less than nine months, if it is to be done in any credible kind of manner,” she said.
Shadick pointed out that it was the Government-nominated GECOM Commissioner, Vincent Alexander, who agreed that there could be no List completed earlier than in nine months. “It was the Commissioner Alexander who said you can have a List by the end of February 2020. It is the same Commissioner Alexander who now says you can have a List by the end of October 2019, without having even started.”
Earlier this month, Government- nominated GECOM Commissioner, Charles Corbin, insisted that House-to- House registration can be completed by October 31, 2019 – less than five months away. “The training is complete. I think that the offices’ clearances have been given for all the management areas across the country. Those have already been set up…. based on the available timetable, we are now in the same time scheme with respect to the process…our deadline for a qualified list is October 31,” he said on Tuesday (June 4, 2019).
However, this timeframe was also the one that GECOM’s attorney, Stanley Marcus, presented to the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ), in early May 2019, during the heading on the cases related to challenge to the vote on the no-confidence motion that was passed in the National Assembly on December 21, 2018.
Marcus had said that House-to-House registration will be completed in five months – from June to October – and a new list of electors would be ready on November 1, 2019. Additionally, the timeframe touted by both Marcus and Corbin contradict what was said earlier this year by GECOM’s Deputy Chief Elections Officer, Roxanne Meyers. Meyers had revealed that the GECOM Secretariat has calculated that House-to-House Registration would take nine months to be conducted.
“The technical analysis, by the secretariat, revealed that House-to-House Registration would take nine months.” Shadick stressed that the current List of Electors includes thousands of eligible voters and the push for new national house-to-house registration does not guarantee that a new List will capture all eligible voters in Guyana.
“All eligible voters must be on the List. You have a National Register of Registrants –from which the List is extracted – that has, up to today, all eligible voters. If you are now going to wipe out that whole register, how are you guaranteeing that you will get back all the eligible voters on that List?” she questioned.
