Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo on Thursday announced that the next General and Regional Elections will be within the period October to November 2025, noting that talks of an early election are “a bunch of nonsense.”
“We’re hoping to have a transparent election,” he told reporters at his weekly press conference.
He was at the time responding to claims made by Alliance For Change Leader, Nigel Hughes that the People’s Progressive Party is in election mode.
In a post made two days ago on social media, Hughes said among other things, “The tea leaves are suggesting that there is likely to be an early election. Government Ministers are holding public meetings. There can be no election without the census results being published first and a clean electoral list. The bloated list of electors will not cut it. Why subject the country to another problematic election.”
To ensure a fair and transparent process, the vice president said a manual will be prepared and circulated ahead of the elections to the media, political parties, and other interested stakeholders, outlining the “duties, obligations, responsibilities, rights of every member who will be part of the conduct of elections.” This includes members of the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) and by extension, polling agents.
Guyana’s last election process lasted from March 2 to August 2, 2020 – five months – due to efforts by the now Opposition parties, A Partnership for National Unity + Alliance For Change (APNU+AFC) Coalition to remain in government. Litigations, missing Statements of Poll (SOPs), and missing documents from some ballot boxes were among the strategies used to derail the declaration of the People’s Progressive Party/ Civic (PPP/C) as the new Government.
In this regard, the manual will also outline documents to be included in the ballot boxes for submission to the offices of the District Returning Offices.
“In this manual you will see long before the elections, you will see which documents have to go into the box and which doesn’t so if the Presiding Officer does not want to put a document into the box, he is [committing] an offence so you don’t have room for people calling up last minute and create confusion,” Jagdeo explained.
Currently, several former employees of GECOM including the former chief elections officer are before the courts on matters relating to electoral fraud.
Since the last elections, some key electoral reform legislation has been addressed to avoid a recurrence.
In 2022, the National Assembly passed the Representation of the People (Amendment) Act for the adoption of clear written procedures for the transmission and tabulation of election results, and for the mandatory publication of detailed polling station results and digital copies of all Statements of Poll (SoPs) which will be posted on GECOM’s website.
This the Vice President said, will ensure transparency. “On the night of the election or the next morning, long before GECOM finishes the tabulation, every citizen should have a copy of every Statement of Poll and they can do their own additions and know who won the elections because it is by law now,” he highlighted on Thursday.
“We went through all of the things where there can be room for ambiguity or capricious action on the part of the CEO or other staff at GECOM and we clarified them so that they are clear to everyone and put in offences for not doing what they should do,” he added.
Recently, the Government, Opposition parties, and other stakeholders met with the Carter Center’s pre-assessment team along with other Elections Observer missions who have been invited to be a part of the next elections process.
