PPP election commissioner vows digital fingerprints won’t be used to deny voting rights

Last Updated on Monday, 28 October 2024, 22:30 by Writer

People’s Progressive Party (PPP) Election Commissioner, Clement Rohee says no or bad fingerprints would not be used as a reason to disenfranchise Guyanese from voting in elections.

“The fact of the matter is no requirement for the digital capture of fingerprints can be imposed to the extent that a Guyanese who is eligible for registration/voting can be denied his or her constitutional right to vote because his/her print might be bad,” he said in response to views by opposition A Partnership for National Unity+Alliance For Change (APNU+AFC) Election Commissioner, Vincent Alexander.

Mr Alexander and mainly the People’s National Congress Reform-led APNU have been demanding that a fingerprint biometric system be put in place at polling stations to prevent multiple voting and voter impersonation. APNU says there is evidence of this in the 2020 election, but a number of persons had come forward with proof that they were in Guyana on polling day. In that regard, Mr Rohee remarked that, “Implicit in this assertion is the hackneyed claim that multiple voting, and voting for or by deceased persons took place in the 2020 elections. This was an attempt to sell a spurious claim that was never bought by the Guyanese electorate nor the international community.”

Attorney General and Minister of Legal Affairs, Anil Nandlall is on record as saying that discussions on amending the law and the constitution for the use of biometrics should be left to the constitutional reform process. The PPP also fears being duped by the PNCR/APNU similar to 1997 when the PPP and PNCR had agreed to use voter identification cards but turned around and challenged the constitutionality of those cards, causing the High Court to vitiate the elections and cut short the PPP’s term of office.

High-level officials of the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) had told Demerara Waves Online News that a number of the existing analog ink-based fingerprints are smudged and could not be captured digitally and would result in the need for re-registration of those persons if the seven-member Commission decides that digital fingerprints must be used as a verification system for voters.

However, Election Commissioner Rohee said though the quality of manually captured fingerprints may, in some cases, be weak, all fingerprints are used in the cross-matching exercise. “My information is that GECOM has never had a case where any one person’s prints was so bad that they could not be used and had to be discarded,” he said.

Mr Rohee added that there are categories of persons from whom it will be impossible to capture digital fingerprints or whose fingerprints may have deteriorated over the years. However, he said it was unlikely that the number of such persons would be large enough to influence the outcome of an election. He said that in either case, no one should be denied the right to register or to vote in an election “simply because their prints don’t match as suggested by Alexander.”

Mr Rohee said “Discussion on Feasibility Study for the introduction of biometrics” would be on the agenda of Tuesday’s meeting of the GECOM. He said discussion on that study had been postponed to make way for job interviews to fill vacancies for a Civic and Voter Education Manager and a Logistics Manager at GECOM.

Mr Rohee was responding to Mr Alexander’s statement that “all manually captured fingerprints can be converted to digital fingerprints.”

However, Mr Alexander, in response, said Mr Rohee’s subsequent contention that the manual prints can be digitized misses the point. “Indeed, they can be digitized but the faulty ones will remain faulty and of little or no use for effective cross-matching. In an electronic system, we all know it is ‘garbage in’, ‘garbage out’. Rohee’s contention is equally garbage in, garbage out,” he said.