Estimating that the Voters’ List has the names of more than 200,000 dead people, and overseas-based Guyanese, Opposition Member of Parliament and Executive Member of the People’s National Congress Reform (PNCR), Ganesh Mahipaul today said that an extremely bloated list coupled with outdated photos of voters, is a recipe for electoral fraud. 

At a Congress Place press conference today, Mahipaul said the situation is deeply troubling and the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) may find itself unable to deliver an election that accurately reflects the democratic will of the Guyanese people.

According to the Elections Commission, the List of Electors currently has more than 718,000 persons.

“The fact that the list of electors will soon match and surpass Guyana’s entire population should alarm the nation. This situation has been caused by the inclusion of over 200,000 deceased local and overseas citizens and those who no longer live here,” Mahipaul told reporters.

He said the “bloated monstrosity” of a list provides sufficient grounds to question whether GECOM can deliver fair elections.

The Opposition MP pressed GECOM to adopt modern election management practice that would prevent multiple voting, voter impersonation, and other cases of fraud. 

He said the current verification system, which is based on manual facial recognition, using the photos on ID cards and folios at polling station is insufficient to guard against voter impersonation. 

“Without doubt, these photos are inadequate in three critical regards: one, on both ID cards and folios, the photos are the size of a small stamp; two, they are mostly blurred and otherwise unclear; and three, worst of all, they were mostly taken in the last House to House exercise in 2008, sixteen years ago. To repeat: sixteen years ago! It means that teenagers registered in 2008 would today be in their 30s. People then in their 40s would now be in their 60s. It is a fact of life that sixteen years of aging would have produced significant changes in how persons look.  In these circumstances, a voter verification system that completely depends on manual facial recognition is prone to both genuine errors and organized manipulation. GECOM must know this is unacceptable,” MP Mahipaul said. 

Mahipaul said for GECOM to argue that the accurate identification of voters is one of its main safeguards against multiple voting is to ignore the fact that the electoral system is totally manual.

He has renewed the party’s call for a clean voters’ list and electronic verification of voters using fingerprint biometrics technology. 

The Elections Commission has said it can only be guided by the law governing elections.

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