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661,000 eligible voters on OLE

Elections 2020

…growth a normal feature of Continuous Registration – Commissioner

Commissioners from the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) have confirmed that the Official List of Electors (OLE) is completed, with some 661,028 eligible voters.
This came out of a statutory meeting at GECOM on Tuesday. Government-nominated Commissioner Vincent Alexander informed the media that the list was ready, although he noted that 661,028 was an unusually high number.

GECOM Commissioner Sase Gunraj

He explained that the National Register of Registrants (NRR), the database of all eligible and future voters, had 663,365 persons. Of this, 646,625 persons were extracted for the Preliminary List of Electors (PLE).
He further related that 6094 persons were removed because of death, while there were 395 objections upheld by GECOM following the Claims and Objections (C&O) exercise. The Revised List of Electors, meanwhile, had 661,378 persons. Alexander also explained that 368 duplicates were removed.

Normal feature
In an invited comment, Opposition-nominated GECOM Commissioner Sase Gunraj said that this growth in eligible voters is normal in the case of Continuous Registration. He further noted that attempts to discredit the list constitute attempts to undermine the process at GECOM.
“While I have my own reservations about what happens at GECOM and the procedures, the size of this list is a normal feature of the Continuous Registration system. And as a consequence, the growth of the list is nothing alarming.”

GECOM Chair Retired Justice Claudette Singh

“In addition to which, the parameters that were used to determine the entries to that list are those which were canvassed before the Chief Justice, who made a ruling as to what ought to be included and what ought not to be included. The list, in my humble opinion, follows the dictates of the ruling of the Chief Justice in that Christopher Ram matter.”
In 2015, when GECOM had published the OLE ahead of those elections, the total number of voters was 570,787.

New registrants w
Over 16,000 new registrants were recorded during the House-to-House (H2H) exercise that ran from July 20 to August 31, 2019. This number was subsequently included on the RLE. However, the Opposition – People’s Progressive Party (PPP) – has always contended that the H2H exercise was largely unsupervised and would produce flawed results.
Indeed, the party subsequently found that many of the persons listed as new registrants are either dead or were previously registered.

GECOM Commissioner Vincent Alexander

It had previously been announced that over 6500 persons of the 16,863 new registrants were not confirmed during the five-day field verification exercise which concluded on December 22. Figures released to the media the next day had shown that Region Four (Demerara-Mahaica) had the highest number of unconfirmed persons, which tallied to 3657.
Some 370,000 registrations obtained during the scrapped $3 billion H2H exercise were sent overseas to be cross-matched with the National Register of Registrants Database (NRRD) in order to filter out the duplicates.

Attempts to remove names
As GECOM continues it elections preparations for the March 2 polls, Attorney General Basil Williams – in the Government’s partial appeal of the House-to-House Registration – is seeking to introduce an old piece of “mysterious” legislation which speaks to inserting residency into the Constitution of Guyana.
This piece of legislation, Constitution Amendment Number 4, Act of 1991, was part of the constitutional reform process prior to the 1992 elections. Williams argued before Chancellor Yonnette Cummings-Edwards and Justices Dawn Gregory and Rishi Persaud, that the court should consider the Act as applicable.
Former AG Anil Nandlall described the Act as irrelevant to current elections. Nandlall pointed out that elections are already set and it would be inconceivable for the court to undo all the work the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) has put into making the elections happen and preparing a voters’ list.
Williams is contesting most of the major points from Chief Justice Roxane George’s August 14, 2019 ruling. One of the major contestations in the appeal is the residency requirement for being registered.
The Chief Justice had ruled that persons, once registered, could not be removed by enumerators without just cause. The AG is also alleging that the Chief Justice, somehow, breached the separation of powers doctrine by ruling that GECOM could not remove registrants who were alive and well.

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“Bloated” final voters list ready -elections commissioner

 

As the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) prepares to certify the final voters list, also called the Official List of Electors (OLE), containing 661,028 persons, at least one pro-coalition elections commissioner on Tuesday reiterated that the roll is bloated.

“So, clearly we are going forward with a bloated list because there is no circumstance under which a population of 750,000 plus with a school population of approximately 200,000 can produce a voters list of 661,000,” Vincent Alexander told reporters.

The opposition People’s Progressive Party (PPP) has always maintained that with sufficient security, vigilance by GECOM and political party representatives, there could be no room for voter irregularities as had been claimed by the governing coalition.

Mr Alexander said at the start of the preparations for the general elections, the national register had contained 663,365 names, and the preliminary list of electors contained 646,625 names. The names of 6,094 persons, who died, were removed based on information from the General Registrar’s Office, there were 68 objections, 16,642 names added from the house-to-house registration exercise, 4,258 claims and objections, and 368 duplicate names removed.

Now, the national register of registrants has 678,105 names and the revised list of electors 661,378.

Mr Alexander and other fellow pro-coalition election commissioners, Charles Corbin and Desmond Trotman, had been at the forefront in calling for the creation of a fresh national register of registrants through house-to-house registration. While a house-to-house registration exercise had been held in July and August, 2019, the High Court had ruled that the existing national register of registrants could not be altered or scrapped.

The commissioners had also wanted to use relevant laws to remove the names of thousands of persons who it is believed have migrated and so are no longer residing in Guyana. But, the Court had also ruled that since no names could be removed from the existing register, eligible voters must be placed on the voters list and if they wished they could return and vote in the districts in which they had been registered.

The Guyana Court of Appeal is yet to set a date to give its decision in an appeal brought by the Attorney General Basil Williams that residency must be a requirement for being included in the national register and the voters’ list.

At the same time, the incumbent A Partnership for National Unity+Alliance For Change (APNU+AFC) of which Williams is a candidate for the March 2 general elections, has been encouraging overseas-based Guyanese to return home to vote. The PPP has also been encouraging its supporters overseas to come back home and vote. BLOATED LIST!!!!

K

The voters list is BLOATED with about 60,000 voters , opposition member commissioner Gunraj said  "normal in the case of Continuous Registration"

Looks like the young Guyanese grow very fast  in a population of 746,955 [2012 Census] and yearly average legal migration of 4,000 + to the USA.

Sean points finger at PNC  rigging.

Django
Last edited by Django
Sean posted:

Bai, given their history of rigged elections, they cannot be trusted.

Once a dog is found sucking egg ,and any eggs missing ,that dog is the suspect , meanwhile there are other egg sucking dogs ,cloaking themselves within the pack. That's the logic for some folks.

Django
kp posted:

“Bloated” final voters list ready -elections commissioner

As the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) prepares to certify the final voters list, also called the Official List of Electors (OLE), containing 661,028 persons, at least one pro-coalition elections commissioner on Tuesday reiterated that the roll is bloated.

“So, clearly we are going forward with a bloated list because there is no circumstance under which a population of 750,000 plus with a school population of approximately 200,000 can produce a voters list of 661,000,” Vincent Alexander told reporters.

Click to Share This Article:

For an estimated 30% for children under 18 years of age, 525,000 rather than 661,000 is a reasonable number for a population of 750,000.

FM

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