Georgetown: The Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) is adamant that new mechanisms must be developed to remove the names of persons who would have passed away and can no longer be part of the country’s voting process. These are unwanted names.
Chairman of the Commission, Dr. Steve Surujbally has vowed however to vigorously pursue the issue of unwanted names in the hopes that by the next election, the matter of will get some form of regulation.
The agency’s current PLE is 567,125, a growth of just over 75,000 since last yea
This issue has been a major one for the election agency as several accusations such as “padding” the Preliminary List of Electors (PLE) has been levelled against it. The process of removing names of deceased persons from the PLE is one stipulated by law and basically requires the production of a death certificate to confirm a person’s passing.
However, the inability to remove these names has led to the growth of the PLE. This growth will eventually be reflected in the final voters list; the Official List of Electors (OLE). The matter was again brought to the fore when GECOM hosted its press conference last week at Cara Lodge to give an update on the recently completed Claims and Objections period.
Chairman of the Commission, Dr. Steve Surujbally highlighted his concern for there to be alternated means to removing unwanted names on the list. He said, “No one wants a list that has people that are dead or registered, verified their residency and then left.”
He said while that is unwanted, the fact is these persons are Guyanese and they have to be registered and verified. To take a person’s name off the list is a big issue, he explained. He went further to highlight the difficulty some Caribbean countries have with this very issue. In one case the population is around 112,000 people and 92,000 persons are on the list.
“What is important,” Dr. Surujbally noted, “is that given a list with many names that we cannot get off, we will have to find methodologies to remove these names even though it is so difficult, because the law entraps us.”
He reiterated that there are a series of processes that the agency has to go through to remove a person’s name, even if that person is publicly known to be dead.
Suggestions to do this, he said, could be to look at in memoriam, death messages and other such announcements and then flag these persons’ names on the list. The agency can also send its agents into communities and villages to get the relevant information to make moves toward cleaning up the list. This will however require a change in law.
Chief Elections Officer (CEO) Keith Lowenfield, added, “The matter is being addressed. We (GECOM) are putting a menu of measures in place to address that issue.” He said that the issue has been discussed extensively at the level of the Commission.
“We have drafted a methodology to operationalise ways to remove the deceased (from the list).”
The matter has also been recognized by the various political parties who are supportive of mechanisms to remove these unwanted names, Dr. Surujbally injected. The political bodies have also had their input, and they feel the same way the election body feels, it was related.
It was insisted, however, that irrespective of the number of persons on list, “we have a menu of measures to ensure that nobody votes in the name of another person.”
It was further mentioned that no activity conducted by GECOM is done without the various party scrutinizers; “It’s a standard procedure.”
The expensive election system was also brought up and Dr. Surujbally used the time to finger the additions to the system such as finger print cross matching and these scrutinizers. “All those things cost money, but we wouldn’t have to expend all that money if we had trust in GECOM and its work”, Dr. Surujbally charged.
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