A proposal by opposition nominated Election Commissioner Vincent Alexander for the incarcerated to be allowed to vote in the 2025 General and Regional Elections, received fierce objections today from the Government nominated Commissioners when the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) met.

Alexander has based his proposal on Article 159 of the Constitution, which states that Guyanese 18-years and older are eligible to vote, except those who are certified to be insane and or have been convicted of an election offence. 

“The Chairman sought to suggest that there is some law that forbids the public or anyone from speaking with prisoners. Therefore, we don’t have the facilitation to allow them to vote. We argued that there is no need to speak to prisoners, that the list of the incarcerated can be compiled the same way in which the list for the Disciplined Forces is compiled, and they can vote on that day without us touching the prisoners. Apart from the fact that we don’t agree that the law forbids persons from speaking to the prisoners because there is a whole range of committees of all sorts that interact with prisoners. And when we talk about prisoners, we have also included people who are on remand,” Alexander told reporters shortly after exiting the meeting.

According to Alexander, the Chairman of the Elections Commission Justice (Ret’d) Claudette Singh, while expressing some legal concerns, committed to doing additional “research” on the issue, the matter is expected to come up again next Tuesday.

But Government Commissioner Sase Gunraj told reporters separately that the issue was thoroughly addressed by the Commission. He said it was concluded that legislative action would be required to allow incarcerated persons to vote.

“This is an issue that requires specific legislation. As you know, prisoners are governed by specific legislation. If you are to think about it pragmatically, to merely say, we are going to put a polling station in the prison. Just like special legislation has been put in place to deal with voting on days outside of election day by disciplined services members, etc, there is no such facility that is in placed in the law to allow voting by prisoners,” Commissioner Gunraj said.

Mr. Gunraj said GECOM must be guided by the law and there will have to be changes to the law to facilitate prisoners voting, whether they are convicted prisoners or are on remand. 

There are more than 2000 persons in Guyana’s prison system.

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