With the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) having published the list of persons registered during the House-to-House exercise this year, it turns out that the list is littered with mistakes and duplicate names that also appear on the Preliminary List of Electors (PLE).
This is according to the People’s Progressive Party (PPP), which on Tuesday was also critical of the information coming out of GECOM. The party took issue with GECOM urging Guyanese to check their names on the H2H list.
“GECOM is essentially telling 300,000-plus Guyanese to visit the GECOM offices. Many of these persons have already checked their names on the Preliminary List of Electors (PLE) and are now being told to return to verify their particulars,” the party said.
According to the party, the registrants’ list having many errors confirms the suspicions the PPP and its Commissioners have been expressing from the start. The party noted that it made checks and did its own investigations and made some startling discoveries.
“There are thousands of names duplicated on the Preliminary List of Electors (PLE) and thousands of persons who are under the voting age of 18. Our investigations would have found too, that dozens of persons listed as new registrants cannot be found at the addresses listed and this is a serious cause for concern – fuelling the worry that there are many non-existent persons on the list published by GECOM.”
Further, the party noted that the House-to-House registrants’ list is not a supplementary list to the PLE and cannot be used during a Claims and Objections exercise. “There is no provision in the laws of Guyana to authorise the publication of a duplicate list that does not originate from the National Register of Registrants Database.”
According to the PPP, the H2H Registration process was flawed from the beginning and any attempt to merge the data from that process with the National Register of Registrants (NRR) can compromise the entire database.
The PPP called on GECOM to immediately withdraw the House-to-House registrants’ list and continue with the ongoing Claims and Objections exercise.
When H2H started this year, it was without the input of the Opposition. In fact, the only party that scrutinised the enumerators during the exercise was the ruling party, as the PPP was not even invited to participate.
This, together with the surreptitious nature in which the exercise started under the backdated order of the former Chairman, James Patterson, and the fact that many people boycotted the exercise, has fuelled suspicion from the Opposition about GECOM’s insistence on using the data.
