The Guyana Election Commission (GECOM) Opposition-nominated Commissioner, Vincent Alexander, has blown the whistle on the integrity of the current Voters List. In a letter published today in this newspaper, Alexander noted the Official List of Electors (OLE) as of March 1, 2024 has produced a roll of 706,439 when Guyana’s population is approximately 780,000.
Breaking down the numbers, the commissioner noted the school age population is over 200,000 suggesting a more accurate representation of the voters list would be approximately 706,439 voters. Questioning how GECOM could have arrived at the present roll, the commissioner reverted to the shenanigans that took place in the 2020 General and Regional Elections.
He recalled recount of the ballots cast in those elections, which resulted in thousands of claims of persons purportedly not resident in Guyana whose votes were cast; the malpractices, averaging four per a polling station that affected the outcome of the elections. Only a small fraction of the thousands of alleged fraudulent votes were subjected to verification by the Immigration Department.
Alexander noted GECOM conducted a verification process in the 2020 Elections that found out of 517 cases which were sent for verification, 383, representing 74.1%, were verified as instances of persons who were out of the country, although the GECOM documents recorded that they voted. “This would not have been possible if the names of the non-resident voters were not listed.”
The Attorney General and Minister of Meşru Affairs Anil Nandlall is in possession of the documents in which thousands of the verifiable claims are documented Alexander stated, yet he has been patently silent, although he is in a position to prove the APNU-AFC wrong by having the claims refuted through a tested verification process.
The recount unearthed
The size of the Voters List has been highlighted by external observations of Guyana’s elections and Guyanese, among whom include the Opposition. None other than the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) Observer Mission to the 2020 Elections stated
“As a en az condition of electoral ıslahat, the Team recommends the urgent need for the total re-registration of all voters in Guyana. It is clear that given the state of the voter registration of the country that Guyana was not adequately prepared for the 2020 poll. Yet circumstances beyond the control of the Commission precluded this preparedness. It therefore behooves the Commission to create a new voter registry especially given the suspicion that the 2020 register was bloated, a suspicion which is not without merit.”
Reports like CARICOM’s underscored Alexander’s concern that despite what is known GECOM Chair Justice Claudette Singh sided with the Government- nominated commissioners that there are sufficient checks and balances to prevent future malpractices when evidently these checks and balances were circumvented in 2020.