OBSERVING THE POLLS

March 25, 2015 | By KNews | Filed Under Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom, Source

A Partnership for National Unity (APNU) is contending that the Official List of Electors (OLE) may be heavily padded. However, just last year when the PPPC had expressed similar reservations, APNU was indifferent to these concerns, and had said that the ruling party was making excuses to avoid holding local government elections.

The PPPC had pointed to numerous instances in which the names of persons on the list ought not to have been there. They had pointed to the example of former President of Guyana, Arthur Chung, who had died many years ago, but whose name had not yet been taken off the list. They pointed to other cases of persons they had not found in their verification of the list.

GECOM had responded with semantics. Instead of joining with the PPPC in urging that the list be sanitized, APNU was indifferent. It held firm to the belief that the PPP was making excuses to avoid local government elections.

The PPPC may have indeed been making excuses and seeking to indicate that GECOM was not in a state of readiness to host elections. But there were legitimate concerns about the list.

APNU should have supported the calls for steps to be taken to ensure that persons whose names ought not to have been on the list were removed.
APNU is now contending that there is a bloated list. It is not using this as an excuse to opt out of the elections. But it is urging its supporters to be vigilant.

The list has in excess of 500,000 names. The population of Guyana on the other hand is offcially below 750,000. What this means is that there are persons who are eligible to vote who will not be around to vote.

However, the danger is that the mere presence of these names on the OLE can open up avenues for electoral fraud. This has long been a worry.  What can happen is that at some polling stations where there is lax oversight, the ballot boxes can be stuffed with ballots to represent those who did not turn up to vote.

The only way this can be avoided is for there to be a system of observers and scrutineers at every polling station. This however is easier said than done, because the number of polling stations rather than getting smaller is becoming larger.

We are told than in excess of 2,300 polling stations will be used at this year’s elections. This leads to too high a ratio of polling stations to voters. But it is too late now to change that without risking confusion on polling day.

As such, in order to reduce or remove voter fraud due to the bloated OLE, what is needed is strong oversight at the polling stations. This however presents a logistical nightmare.

GECOM has to certify scrutineers for the various political parties. There have always been complaints about this.  During the last election, at one polling station a party polling agent had to leave for a call of nature. There was an attempt to have the person substituted. This was rejected by the polling officer in charge of the station, and rightly so, because the replacement was not approved by GECOM.

The certification of thousands of party polling agents has always presented challenges for GECOM. There have also been problems with the certification of independent polling agents. With many groups in Guyana expressing an interest in observing the elections and with a likely increase in the number of international observers, GECOM is going to have problems in certifying polling agents and observers.

One solution to this problem would be for there to be one umbrella body for local observers. For example, instead of the Private Sector Commission and the Electoral Affairs Bureau fielding independent observer teams, there should be a single local observer team.

In this way, GECOM will only have to certify one independent polling agent per polling station. In this way also, there can be an independent polling agent at every single polling station to reduce the possibility of persons voting for those who did not turn up to vote.

If there are too many local observer groups, GECOM is going to be overwhelmed with the task of certifying the various polling agents. Having all local observers operate under one umbrella body will ensure that every single polling station is covered. This is an absolute necessity in these elections which are expected to see tight races, region by region, between the parties involved.

But having one single umbrella body is only half of the solution. The other half is ensuring that these observers are allowed to monitor the count.

There were reports in the past that polling agents monitored voting, but when it came to the count they were asked to keep at a distance and therefore could not verify the counting process was accurate and fair.