PPP benefitted from padded voters list’
-PM says party lost some 54,292 votes between 2001-2011
PRIME minister Moses Nagamootoo said there are legitimate beliefs that the existing voters’ list is contaminated with names of deceased persons, Guyanese who have long migrated and, possibly, it is padded with the names of aliens or phantoms.
He said too that there are suspicions that the Opposition PPP has benefitted from the padded list. Writing in his Sunday Chronicle column, Prime Minister Nagamootoo said Minister of Communities, Ronald Bulkan, had shared with him some interesting statistics on the voting patterns during elections between 1997 and 2015. He said at the 1997 elections (the last during the Jagan era), the PPP received 220,632 votes. However, in the post-Jagan period, it started to lose votes between 2001 and 2011, as follows:-In 2001, its votes fell to 210,013 or by 10,619; in 2006 its votes again fell to 183,988 or by 26,025; in 2011 its votes fell to an all-time low of 166,340 or by 17,648.
“The cumulative loss between 2001 and 2011 was 54,292 votes. But, inexplicably, the PPP polled 202,694 votes at the 2015 elections, or an increase by 36,354 votes over its showing in 2011, during which period the government had wallowed in corruption and had sunken to an all-time low in popularity. Key leaders, including former Speaker, Ralph Ramkarran and myself, left the party; other “Jaganites” were alienated,” Nagamootoo wrote.
He said it must raise much more than curiosity that when the list stood at 475,496 voters in 2011, the PPP lost 17,548 votes to the then opposition parties. Combined, the APNU and AFC polled 175,011 votes as against the PPP’s 166,340. The latter won on a plurality of votes, but with a minority of parliamentary seats – 32, against 33 for the APNU+AFC.
However, in 2015, when the voters’ list jumped upwards by a whopping 107,948 voters, the PPP romped home with 202,694 votes or 36,354 more than it had received in 2011. “It is evident that the padding of the list benefitted the PPP and, without more, the “phantoms” came out to vote for this party,” Nagamootoo said.
He said now allegations are surfacing about some possible reasons for the padding, with several persons in at least one location found to be in possession of faked birth certificates and national identification cards. The Prime Minister quoted a Guyana Chronicle headline: “Probe launched into fake birth certificates”; “Region 9 residents tie PPP to alleged racket”, were met with the PPP’s rebuttal that these claims are a “political ploy”.
The coalition had made the case that the voters’ list was contaminated and that the only way to clean it up was through house-to-house registration. This national exercise was conducted by the Guyana Elections Commission but was shortened after close to 400,000 persons were registered to facilitate an extensive claims and objections period. GECOM also said it will be merging the data gathered during the house-to-house registration with that of the National Register of Registrants.
Opposition Leader, Bharrat Jagdeo at his weekly press conference, last Thursday, said that a merger of the house-to-house registration and the NRR was a delaying tactic to push elections until next year and that the merger would “further” contaminate the NRR list.
But General Secretary of the Peoples National Congress Reform, Amna Ally responded: “How it is if you merge the information from house-to-house registration to what exists as the NRR you are going to have contamination? Is it that he is admitting that the NRR is corrupt? Is it that he is admitting that the NRR is no good? I am sure silently he is.”
Ally noted that even as GECOM prepares for the hosting of Regional and General Elections, a credible Official List of Electors (OLE) is of critical importance. Ally questioned why the PPP is prepared to go to elections without a credible OLE, establishing that the PNC/R “will continue to advocate for a credible list of electors”. “The PPP is prepared to go to the polls with any list, they don’t care if the list is corrupted.
Why? It is essential that we hold fair, free and credible elections and we cannot do so if the people of Guyana believe that the list is outdated and corrupted. The process GECOM takes to sanitise the list must therefore take into consideration the concerns expressed,” Ally who is also Minister of Social Protection said.
Ally reminded that it is also up to GECOM to come up with a method of ensuring that it provides a credible OLE. “Elections can only be held when GECOM notifies us that they are ready, the underpinning thing is that there is need for a credible list so that we can have credible elections,” Ally said.
“GECOM has a right to implement whatever process they have to implement in order to produce a credible list. The house-to-house is not illegal, and there is an NRR. GECOM has to know what they are going to do to put the two together to come up with a credible list, and I have full confidence in GECOM that they have the capability to produce such a list.”
