Opposition appears intent on blaming GECOM for elections loss – AG Nandlall

The Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) has faced vile and unwarranted criticism, from the APNU+AFC Opposition over its decision not to implement electronic fingerprint capture for the 2025 elections.

Attorney General and Minister of Legal Affairs Mohabir Anil Nandlall, SC, said that the opposition is attempting to find excuses in advance for the massive loss they will endure at the 2025 polls.

“When they realise, as they have realized now, that they cannot win a fair election, when they realize that they cannot secure the ballots of the electorate in majority to win an election, they always direct their attack and their scrutiny to the electoral system and GECOM,” Minister Nandlall said during this week’s broadcast of Issues in the News.

Attorney General and Minister of Legal Affairs, Mohabir Anil Nandlall, SC

The Attorney General cited the Esther Perreira case of 1998. He said that the opposition demanded the introduction of voter ID cards and then opposed it after the People’s National Congress (PNC) lost the General and Regional Elections in that year.

The presiding judge, Justice Claudette Singh, now Chairperson of GECOM, ruled that requiring ID cards to vote was unconstitutional under Article 59 of Guyana’s Constitution.

As a result of Justice Singh’s decision, the People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C) government’s term was cut short just three years into its five-year mandate and new elections were held.

The Attorney General criticised the opposition’s pattern of shifting its stance on electoral matters to suit its own interests, arguing that its call for unconstitutional biometric requirements is a repetition of past tactics.

“So now, they want biometrics. I have said to you over and over again that we have biometrics in our system already. We have fingerprints, we have photographs, we have distinguishing marks. All of that [is] in our database,” he explained.

The Attorney General rebutted the position that sufficient safeguards are not in place to avoid voter impersonation at the polls.

“We have several safeguards to ensure that a wrong person [doesn’t] come and vote…you have to be registered, your name must be on a list, you can only vote at that polling station where your name is on that list. When you turn up at that polling place, you have a presiding officer, an assistant presiding officer, and you have a representative of every political party seated there as polling agents,” the minister outlined.

He continued, “because they are likely to lose, they want to come now with all these technical artifices so they can fault it in the end.”

A citizen placing his ballot in the box on elections day

In her January 16, 2025 decision on the matter of biometrics, Chairman Ret’d Justice Claudette Singh said that barring individuals from voting solely due to the absence of fingerprint identification would be unconstitutional.

Senior Counsel Nandlall said that Justice Singh’s decision is in direct alignment with her ruling in the infamous 1997 Esther Perreira case.

“[She] has said to them, again…biometrics is just like the ID card in [the] Esther Perreira [case]. If a voter turns up and you prevent him from voting because he doesn’t satisfy some biometric requirement you have, you are doing the same thing that was done in the 1997 elections…you are adding a requirement that is not in the constitution,” the Senior Counsel proffered. The Private Sector Commission (PSC) and the Federation of Independent Trade Unions of Guyana (FITUG) have openly expressed their support for the integrity of GECOM’s systems that are currently in place to ensure that the process of voting on Election Day adheres to the highest standards of democracy.

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