AFC on three-pronged approach to cleanse voters list

Last Updated on Sunday, 6 October 2024, 16:02 by Writer

AFC Leader Nigel Hughes addressing a party Town Hall meeting in Queens, New York. He is flanked by Laura George and Dr Rohan Somar.

The Alliance For Change (AFC) on Saturday said the High Court could soon be asked to rule on the credibility of the voters list and draft legislation would be tabled in the National Assembly to empower the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) to clean up that list.

“There’s an argument being explored that your right to vote and the significance of that vote depends on the assumption that your list is representative of the electors who are eligible so if the list is not representative by either people like Venezuelans who would not otherwise comply then your right to vote has been adversely impacted and you can ask for a declaration,” AFC Leader Nigel Hughes said.

In the 2020 elections, 464, 565 persons had voted. Guyana’s population, based on the 2012 census, is 746, 955.

Participants at an AFC Town Hall Meeting in Queens, New York.

The AFC said it was also trying to convince the international community that send observers to Guyana’s elections to publicly state that a credible list was key to a democratic process. AFC executive member, Catherine Hughes said international observers have stated that the voters list “is a problem”. “We’re meeting with all of them and pushing them to speak and make a statement on it regularly so GECOM (Guyana Elections Commission) starts to deliver a clean voters list,” she stated.

The announcements were made at an AFC outreach to the Guyanese Diaspora in Queens, New York. Mr Hughes said lawyers were studying the possibility of seeking a High Court declaration that the voters’ list was bloated and could not be used to conduct the 2025 general and regional elections.

With the High Court already ruling in 2019 that names could not be removed from the database of the National Register of Registrants through house-to-house registration but through claims and objections and collaboration between GECOM and the Registry of Births and Deaths, AFC Chairman David Patterson said his party would introduce legislation in the National Assembly to do so. “We’d also know shortly who is for it, who is not because we are going to propose the legislation. GECOM said they can’t do this, they can’t do that. We’ll be carrying it to Parliament and let us see if the PPP will support it or not,” he said.

The People’s Progressive Party Civic (PPPC)-led administration is on record as saying that such an issue should be addressed by the constitutional reform process. That Commission recently began its work but there is skepticism that it could finish its work, including making recommendations and enacting changes to the Constitution, before the 2025 elections. The PPP also insists that there are sufficient safeguards at polling stations to avoid multiple voting or substitute voting in the names of dead or deceased persons.

The opposition’s proposal for the introduction of a biometric system has not been entirely rejected by the PPPC, but has cautioned against that being used as a means to disenfranchise electors from casting ballots.