GECOM corrects mismatched electors with polling places, others will be transported to polling stations

Last Updated on Tuesday, 26 August 2025, 16:17 by Writer

The Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) secretariat on Monday said fewer than 20 names of electors that were found to have been mismatched with polling stations as a result of the aborted 2019 house-to-house registration exercise have been fixed.

Deputy Chief Election Officer Aneal Giddings said “they are not many, they weren’t in a widespread amount and we have corrected what we discovered over the course of time.” Asked how many had been found so far and fixed, he could only say they were in their “teens”. “We correct them as we move along. We never really kept stats on them,” he said.

He said those discrepancies could not be fixed automatically and so the entire voters roll, now totalling 757,690 persons, must be perused by the registration officers after a list, such as the preliminary voters list, is generated. “This issue has confronted ever since the 2019 house-to-house and we have been reviewing the entire register. It is a painstaking process because it has to be done manually since addresses of persons, while they have to be tied to a division, there is no way in the system that this could be done automatically,” said Mr Giddings, an information technology (IT) expert.

Mr Giddings also said nothing could be done now to correct similar mistakes because the list had already been certified, produced, published and in ballot boxes. He said electors facing such problems could be contacted and the commission would transport those persons to the polling stations to cast their ballots on September 1. “In my consideration, if it is an error of GECOM then we have to ensure that we do what is necessary to ensure that elector is availed the opportunity to cast their ballot without any difficulty,” he said.

At least one elector’s name remains mismatched between his address and the location of his polling station. He is Keiron Lindon Abrigo whose registered address is 457 Eleventh Street, Paradise, East Coast Demerara while his polling station is given as Lodge Nursery School, Georgetown.

Chief Election Officer Vishnu Persaud said the seven-member Commission was never informed but handled by the Secretariat. “Formally, I would say ‘no’ because, like I said, something like this we would have interrogated at the level of the Secretariat and then take it to the Commission in writing. I have not done so, we have not done so,” he said.