New electoral reforms to cater for periodic removal of dead names from voters list – AG Nandlall

Sep 12, 2022 News

Attorney General (AG) Anil Nandlall, SC

Kaieteur News – Attorney General, Anil Nandlall, SC has said that the proposed amendments to electoral laws will see the removal of dead persons from the ‘voters’ list taking place periodically.
During his live-streamed Facebook show, ‘Issues in the News’, Nandlall addressed accusation by the Opposition-led A Partnership For National Unity +Alliance for Change (APNU+AFC) that the Government does not want the names of dead persons removed from the list. He said, the ruling People Progressive Party /Civic (PPP/C) is always in support of a ‘clean voters’ list.

“Let me reject that contention unreservedly, the PPP has always said that the persons who are on that list must be removed based upon provisions in the law that relate to removal of persons from the list,” he said.

The Attorney General revealed that the amendment that the Government is proposing in the electoral reforms is to make it mandatory for dead persons to be removed from the list at periodic intervals.

This, he said, means that persons must be removed from the list based upon the legal grounds for removing them. Death, he stressed is one of the legal grounds to remove persons from the list.
As such, he reiterated that “…. Within the time specified in the amendments, there must be collaboration between the General Registrar’s Office that is the person who keeps all the death records. There must be collaboration between that Office and GECOM for the purpose of comparing records.”

The Government had previously expressed that it wants the law to be very explicit in stating that the Chief Elections Officer (CEO) must secure from the General Registration Office a list of all dead persons to then remove those persons from the voters list. “GECOM has the right now to remove people from the list based on maybe a death certificate, so we want to make the process transparent so GECOM should do that on a large scale,” Vice-President Bharrat Jagdeo said back in May.

He added that it must be stated in law that they must share the list of dead persons gathered for every year to the political parties and publicise the list in the newspapers. “We want to put that into the law, so every time they remove dead people, they must share this with all the parties in Guyana and publish it in the newspapers, not just do it in GECOM on their own,” Jagdeo had said.