Vice President, Bharrat Jagdeo believes the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) must take appropriate steps to remove dead persons from the Official List of Electors (OLE).

As of March 1, 2024, approximately 704,439 voters were registered on the Official List of Electors.

With the school age population estimated to be just over 200,000, longstanding Elections Commissioner, Vincent Alexander has stated that the resident voting population should be approximately 580,000. He contends that the voter list exceeds the resident voting population by over 126,000 persons, and includes a large number of deceased persons.  

But while dismissing the contention that the Voters’ List is “bloated,” Vice President Jagdeo told reporters on Thursday that while Guyanese residing abroad cannot be removed from the List, the Government would like to see the removal of persons who are no longer alive.

“Now he is talking about dead people. We are all in favor of removing dead people whether they died abroad or in Guyana, they must be removed from the list. GECOM has to move them from the list but it can’t be that you remove people who are living because they are residing abroad now because that would be unconstitutional as the Chief Justice pointed out,” the Vice President told a news conference. 

Mr. Jagdeo said, however, that the Government is satisfied that the Elections Commission has the requisite systems in place to guard against voter impersonation. 

“We have a folio with their picture. GECOM has a folio with people’s pictures, many countries don’t have that – a picture ID and a folio – the staff to match people when they come in and say, this is the real person. We have a ton of checks and balances in the polling places. As a result of that of 660,000 people on the list in 2020, only 460,000 voted,” the Vice President said. 

But in an interview with News Source this week, Commissioner Alexander said the excess number of persons on the OLE should not be taken for granted. He pointed out that during the recount of the ballots cast in the 2020 elections, the Immigration Department, amid allegations of voter impersonation, confirmed that 383 persons, who were listed to vote and allegedly voted, were out of the jurisdiction on Elections Day.

“That voters’ list contains tens of thousands of Guyanese who died overseas and therefore have no legitimate right to be retained on the list. Nobody could question that, and they are skirting around it. And my contention in GECOM is that if we know that there are that number of overseas dead and dead people shouldn’t be on the list, then we should find a way to solve the problem. Because it is a real problem in so far as in 2020, the recount process threw up thousands of names of persons, who were listed as having voted but who it was contended were not in the country,” Alexander said. 

He said while it is claimed that GECOM has “all systems in place” and there is no room for voter impersonation, “the fact of the matter is, it occurred.”

The Elections Commissioner said in the absence of a solution to the removal of persons, who died overseas, from the list, serious consideration must be given to the use of biometrics at the place of poll.

“My contention is even as we search for an absolute solution to this problem, if we introduce electronic finger print identification at the place of poll, then people who go to vote for dead people or absent people will not be able to cast the vote, because the finger print system will show them to be not the person for whom they are pretending to cast the vote,” Alexander reasoned. 

Chairman of the Guyana Elections Commission, Justice (Ret’d) Claudette Singh, however, has long ruled out the possibility of using electronic fingerprinting at polling stations on the basis that eligible voters could be disenfranchised, resulting in the breach of the Constitution.

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