Govt to rush through legislation to allow GECOM to prepare Local Govt elections voters list

Last Updated on Friday, 4 September 2015, 20:19 by GxMedia

The government has decided to rush through a key piece of legislation,  one day before the National Assembly goes into a one-month recess, to facilitate the extraction of the voters list for Local Government Elections from the National Register of Registrants.

The sitting is scheduled for September 9 at 2 PM.

The rules governing the House are to be suspended to facilitate the second reading and remaining stages of the Local Authorities (Elections) (Amendment) Bill 2015 – Bill No. 9 of 2015.

The current law states that the voters list for Local Government Elections must be extracted from the 1992 Voters List.

However, a senior Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) source said that would not be possible and so there is need for the amendment which would be tabled, debated and passed by government’s simple majority on September 9.

The source noted that the existing legislation also provides for Nomination Day to be 21 days before the polling day under a Proportional Representation (PR) system, but now that Local Government Elections would be run on a constituency system there would be need for more time.