Declaring that the current electoral system has little room for error, Attorney General and Minister of Legal Affairs Anil Nandlall, has again shut down a suggestion by Opposition Commissioner at GECOM Vincent Alexander and the Opposition APNU+AFC for there to be a biometric system of voting as well as a clean voters’ list before the next General and Regional Elections.

Speaking during his weekly, Issues In the News programme, Mr. Nandlall said while he welcomes the use of technology, he does not believe that the country is ready for voting using that method. He said issues such as blackout, or a system trip could throw an election in disarray.

“If I go and I put my finger in the machine and for whatever reason the machine malfunctions, you telling me that I will be denied my right to vote? I am not opposed to any form of technology but the manual system is working, why you want to resort to technology where things can go wrong in a country like Guyana,” the Attorney General questioned.

In a letter to the Press yesterday, GECOM Commissioner, Vincent Alexander put forward the view that digital fingerprint identification at the place of poll provides a universally accepted and used mechanism that would prevent voter impersonation. 

“Fingerprints are not forgeable. Digitally captured prints will not be sub-quality as may occur in the instance of some manually captured prints. Faulty fingerprints are rejected by the software when the prints are being captured digitally, hence the rationale for, and benefit of, capturing fingerprints digitally, in the registration process. Only perfect prints will be registered on the system. Hence, subsequent cross-matching will cross-match all of the prints thus detecting all of the duplicates.” Alexander stated.

But Mr. Nandlall brushed aside the contention of Mr. Alexander.

“This is a bizarre contention. How is it possible for a ballot to be cast in the name of a person who is not present, it means that someone purported to be the person whose name is on the list, and how is that possible having regard to all the mechanisms that were present and in place at the polling place,” Nandlall questioned.

He also said the issue of the voter’s list has been canvassed and noted that the list has been used in previous elections without any issues.

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