Chairman of the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) Dr Steve Surujbally said yesterday that he is vigorously pursuing the establishment of continuous registration as a step toward ensuring voter participation and reducing disenfranchisement.

Speaking yesterday at the beginning of a two-day workshop on continuous registration held at the Cara Inn, Pere Street, Kitty, he noted that such a system would require technical sophistication, particularly with computing hardware and software in order to maintain and continually update information. The International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES) funded the workshop.

He said too that commissioners and secretarial staff recognised the concern, even dissatisfaction, of many throughout the history of elections in Guyana over the issues of accountability and integrity in the conduct of elections and the accuracy of the electoral role. He said too that foreign teams observing elections in Guyana have corroborated the shortcomings in the registration process that had been expressed by stakeholders.

A continuous list of voters is one in which the electoral register is maintained and continually updated by the election administration. The system requires appropriate infrastructure to maintain the list and this requires adding the names and other relevant information of those who satisfy eligibility. The information includes citizenship, residency and voting age. The process also involves deleting of the names of those who are no longer eligible through death or change of residency. Since the list will be continuously updated, there is no need to conduct a final registration effort just before an election, as is normally the case with the periodic list.

The continuous registration also allows for the list of voters to be open for public inspection at all times during the year and not only at a specified period

Surujbally said that one of the first steps toward the implementation of the continuous registration system is to look at the legal framework associated with the periodic registration, which currently obtains. The next step is to prepare, discuss and refine a draft document to facilitate continuous registration in Guyana.

The commissioners re-viewed the document and were unanimous in their endorsement of it and in June 2002 they initiated a consultative process with the major stakeholders.

Giving an overview of the process, Chief Election Officer of GECOM, Gocool Boodhoo, said that for the system to work persons must comply with requests to provide updated information and their failure to do so may result in a disproportionately large number of revisions in the final stage of list preparation. Motor registration and tax records may be used in the passive updating of the list with little or no participation from the voter.

Boodhoo said also that the periodic register of voters is one from which the elections administration devises a new voters’ list for each electoral event, without intending to maintain or update that list for use in the future. Such a list, he said, is produced immediately preceding the elections, normally within a short timeframe.

This system, he said, is relatively expensive and time consuming, since it requires election administration officials to come into direct contact with all eligible voters before the elections. He said that this method of voter registration might be particularly useful where the electoral administration infrastructure is not sufficiently developed to maintain a continuous list, where population mobility is high or where the citizenry is averse to the maintenance of lists of citizens by the state.

Among the shortcomings of the present system is that the cost of registering voters is focused during the registration period, rather than being spread throughout the election cycle. He added that developing periodic lists can put a strain on available resources.

The workshop, which saw the participation of senior staff of GECOM, representatives of the major political parties, IFES Programme Officer for Guyana, Pablo Galarce; Director of Elections, Jamaica, Danville Walker; and Chief Elections Officer, Trinidad and Tobago, Howard Cayenne, concludes today. (Johann Earle)