Georgetown: Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM), Chairperson, (rtd) Justice Claudette Singh on Friday reiterated that she will not accept or allow any transgressions to take place during and in the aftermath of Regional and General Elections.
“I will not sell my integrity for all the oil in Guyana,” she told reporters as she arrived at the Umana Yana for Nominations Day. “Only one way I know and that is the correct way.”
The GECOM chair noted that the process leading up to Nomination Day entailed hard work.
“We worked overtime, even at Christmas. The work ran from day to night. Even yesterday, we had an emergency meeting.”
Addressing concerns about the credibility of the Revised List of Electors which is up for public scrutiny, Justice Singh noted that the Commission cannot take action based on mere claims.
“We need evidence. There was no evidence that those people were not registered or they were saying that there were house lots which were found vacant. “We needed that evidence and if that was presented then GECOM would have dealt with it.”
At the interim, the GECOM Chair noted that the Commission cannot remove the names or run the risk of disenfranchising voters.
GECOM faced a number of allegations in the process of producing a list of electors for the March 2, 2020 elections.
For one, the Commission was accused of ignoring reports that the current list contained names of nonexistent electors who were included during the truncated house-to-house registration process.
The Commission was belatedly accused of tampering with the National Register of Registrants (NRR).
GECOM has vehemently assured electors on several occasions that the data garnered from the House-to-House Registration exercise would be used in the preparation of the list for General and Regional Elections.
Opposition Leader Bharrat Jagdeo had on Thursday expressed concerns over the inclusion of unverified persons on the Revised List of Electors (RLE).
Initially, some 20,000 persons were listed as new registrants from the now-scrapped House-to-House Registration.
The parliamentary Opposition had, however, found that these “new registrants” included duplicates, persons who were already registered, or in some cases, dead.
After some double-checking, it was found at 16,000 persons were actually “new registrants”.
Following pressure from the Opposition-nominated Commissioners, GECOM staff had embarked on a field verification activity before including the 16,000 persons, that were registered, on the List of Electors.
From that exercise, 10,000 persons were verified, leaving 6000 unverified. GECOM, despite protest from the Opposition, decided to include those persons on the RLE – a move which was not approved by the People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C).
But the GECOM boss defended the move.
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