Latest update April 18th, 2024 12:59 AM
Oct 22, 2011 Editorial
The elections are just over a month away, and from all appearances, there are people who couldn’t care less about whether there is going to be a change in government. In fact, these people are going to pay little or no attention to who leads the country, because they are either too busy to care or too hungry to be bothered.
This has long been the case of elections in Guyana. There are those who recognize the importance of the vote, if only because of historical reasons. These are the people who know that there was a time when they could not vote because of the property qualifications. These are the people who are aware of their forebears’ struggles, often suffering violence because they wanted to have a say in the affairs of their governance.
Claims of rigging at the elections and further claims of padded voters’ lists caused the authorities to conduct at least two house-to-house registration exercises. Those registrations determine who would be included in the voters’ lists. And that determination is accompanied by a national identification card.
It goes without saying that the registration exercise was a costly affair—a very costly affair. To add to the cost has been the production of the identification cards, one of the criteria for actually casting a ballot. On Thursday, the Guyana Elections Commission announced that some 30,000 national identification cards were uncollected.
This must be worrying for the various political parties. The last elections saw the ruling party winning the polls by just over 30,000 votes. And in the context, those 30,000 votes represent six seats in the National Assembly.
Indeed, some of those who have not collected the identification cards may have migrated, because Guyana is one of the countries that has a stalled rate of population growth. Annual migration is so great that already the effects can be measured by the number of empty properties that adorn coastal Guyana. Berbice, being a border location, may have recorded one of the highest numbers of emigrants and indeed, it has one of the highest percentages of empty houses.
Georgetown with about one-third of the population also boasts a large number of empty houses because the homeowners cannot even find people to keep the houses in their absence.
But there are those who simply could not be bothered. These are the people who could make a difference one way or the other at the polls, but who would prefer to sit and complain if they were to encounter hardships some time after the polls.
In addition to the failure or refusal of the 30,000 people to uplift their identification cards, are those who did not even bother to get registered. The numbers are not known, but rest assured, these would be among the people who would want to see improvements in their lives. They too would be among the critics of the government for any problem that they may encounter.
A suggestion that the cards be mailed to the registrant was negated on the grounds that GECOM wanted to ensure that the identification card is given to the person who registered; that the postal service could not be trusted to deliver the cards because of security concerns.
If the voting bloc was very large the failure of 30,000 people to uplift the identification cards would not have mattered. But in Guyana with its partisan politics and the drive for seats in Parliament, every vote counts. The political parties should have been working assiduously to get people to collect the unclaimed cards.
Did representatives of the various political parties pay house-to-house visits to recruit voters? Did those encountered have identification cards? And if not, did the representatives of the political parties try to get these people to collect their cards?
We think not. Had there been serious political work then the elections commission would not have been reporting at this late stage, that it still had some 30,000 identification cards in its possession. Yet it is not too late. We are certain that this would not be, as has been in the case with some political parties in the past when they sought to present as candidates, people who had not even registered.
For example, when the ruling party tried to present Dr James Rose as a candidate in the municipal elections, it transpired that he was ineligible because he was not a registered voter.
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