Deviant GECOM officials may be blacklisted – Commissioner

May 12, 2020 News

If an official of the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) is found to be incompetent or deviant, that official may be blacklisted by GECOM according to Vincent Alexander during a press briefing yesterday, on the outskirts of the Arthur Chung Conference Centre.

Region Four Returning Officer, Clairmont Mingo

The Commissioner explained that such a process, “collateral to this exercise called the recount” entertains the question of “how you deal with officers who either prove to be incompetent or who prove to be deviant in their behaviour”.
He said that this is a matter that will have to be looked at, after the completion of the recount.
GECOM would have to determine who those persons are, and why they behaved in a way that questions their competence or calls their credibility into question.
Alexander said that this decision had been made long ago, when Gocool Boodhoo was Chief Elections Officer, “that we should have a pool of election officials to resort to from time to time, as elections come along.”
“That would have to be activated and applied at this time,” he stated.
While he is adamant that this should happen, and said he would advocate for same, Alexander indicated that the decision to undertake such a process would have to be made by the seven-member Commission.
Commissioner Sase Gunraj had, before the recount started, advocated for the exclusion of several GECOM officials from the recount on the grounds that they displayed openly partisan behaviour in favour of the governing Coalition during the Region Four tabulations. His contention is that those persons were a party to electoral fraud.
The most contentious figure, Region Four Returning Officer, Clairmont Mingo, was excluded from the recount by the Chair of GECOM, Justice Claudette Singh, after calls mounted for his removal.