PPP hopes GECOM will be ready in eight months for elections

Last Updated on Friday, 15 November 2024, 19:57 by Writer

The governing People’s Progressive Party Civic (PPPC) expects the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) will be ready by next July to hold general elections, party General Secretary Bharrat Jagdeo said Thursday.

“GECOM has to be ready. They should have been ready by March 2nd because that’s when elections were held but I actually said August because that’s when the President was sworn in but they have to be ready by that time to say to the President ‘you can call elections whenever you wish to’ so that’s really eight months away,” he told a news conference.

He pegged that timeframe to GECOM’s August 2, 2020, declaration of the PPP as the winner of the March 2020 elections after the national vote recount.

Mr Jagdeo said he was wary of a number of opposition ploys such as the call for digital fingerprinting of everyone in the country as part of a scheme to introduce biometrics at polling stations to prevent voter fraud. He said such a process could take eight months.

“They think they will set a trap for us. We want elections. We don’t want a single day beyond what is constitutionally given to the PPP. We don’t want a single day beyond that because the next day they will say ‘illegal government'”, he said.

Previously, Mr Jagdeo had said that general and regional elections would be held in October or November, 2025, and that incumbent President, Irfaan Ali would be the candidate once again.

Mr Jagdeo believed that the opposition wants to use biometrics as a condition for voting in order to disenfranchise segments of the voting populations because it was not ready for the polls. He said the PPP was keen on having a clean voters list, robust political party polling agents and full compliance with the revised Representation of the People Act.

The PPPC General Secretary again shrugged off questions about a referendum on whether the 2016 Production Sharing Agreement with ExxonMobil should be renegotiated, instead stressing that “right now GECOM must focus on one question which is holding elections within the constitutionally prescribed timeframe.”