In a majority decision on Tuesday, the Guyana Elections Commission voted to introduce a new form for the submission of nominations by political parties.

However, while the Opposition Commissioners are in support of the changes, they believe the timing is bad with elections less than three months away.

Election Commissioner Vincent Alexander told News Source today that the new form is intended to address the issue of a single individual signing on behalf of multiple nominators as was evident in past elections.

He said it was the Chief Elections Officer (CEO), Vishnu Persaud, who had proposed that the form be updated to include clear instructions that the nominators are required to sign.

“In the last Local Government Election, it was evident that on some of the nomination forms, the forms on which candidates are nominated, that the signatories were not the individuals whose names were recorded but that one person seemed to have signed, so really, those forms were not properly endorsed. What the CEO has done in this occasion, in the bracket for the signature he has specified in the head that it has to be the signature of the nominator. So, it can’t be anybody signing. We thought that, that was not a bad thing for him to do,” Alexander told News Source.

He said the Opposition nominated Commissioners proposed that the use of the new or updated form be phased in, but the Chairman of the Elections Commission (GECOM), retired Justice Claudette Singh voted with the Government nominated Commissioners to use only the new form for the 2025 Elections.

He said the decision was taken, notwithstanding the fact that the original form was uploaded to GECOM’s website, and is already being accessed by some political parties.

“Our concern, therefore was, if you impose upon people to use the new form then you might be putting people at a disadvantage if they had already used the old form, which may have required them to go into the hinterland. Because you are dealing with constituencies, you have to get signatures of the constituencies, and they may have gone to the hinterland already, which is costly, which is far, done the work, and now we are saying to them go back because you have to use a new form,” he reasoned.

In a majority decision, the Elections Commission also voted not to underline the names of the overseas persons as proposed by Commissioner Alexander and the other Opposition nominated Commissioners.

He said the move was intended to address voter impersonation, arguing that the list of Guyanese who are based overseas could have been easily provided by the Chief Immigration Officer to the Commissioner of Registration as provided for in the law.

“It means one, that we will not be taking people off of the list, but it means that the polling officials, the party officials can be more vigilant if somebody turns up to vote using the name of a person who is listed as overseas. And once that person, turns out to be the right person by ID card and other factors, obviously the person would be allowed to vote but this is intended to be a deterrent to people coming to vote for people who are not present,” Alexander said.

He expressed disappointment that many of the measures proposed by the Opposition nominated Commissioners to prevent electoral fraud and have free and fair elections were shot down, at a time when the list is almost the size of the country’s population.

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