Prime Minister of Guyana, Moses Nagamootoo, is questioning the surge in votes received by the Peoples’ Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C) in the May 2015 elections when the voting patterns for the three previous elections indicated a downward trajectory. His contention is that the voters’ list has anomalies, which profited the PPP/C.
In his column, “My Turn”, the former PPP/C Executive said that there are legitimate beliefs that the existing voters’ list is contaminated with names of deceased persons, Guyanese who have long migrated and possibly “aliens or phantoms”.
Nagamootoo said that the Minister of Communities, Ronald Bulkan shared with him statistics on the voting patterns during elections between 1997 and 2015.
According to the PM, at the 1997 elections the PPP received 220,632 votes but started to lose votes between 2001 and 2011.
“In 2001, its votes fell to 210,013 or by 10,619; in 2006 its votes again fell to 183,988 or by 26,025; in 2011 its votes fell to an all-time low of 166,340 or by 17,648…The cumulative loss between 2001 and 2011 was 54,292 votes. But, inexplicably, the PPP polled 202,694 votes at the 2015 elections, or an increase by 36,354 votes over its showing in 2011, during which period the government had wallowed in corruption and had sunken to an all-time low in popularity.” Nagamootoo penned.
He said it must raise much more than curiosity that when the list stood at 475,496 voters in 2011, the PPP lost 17,548 votes to the then opposition parties. Combined, the APNU and AFC polled 175,011 votes as against the PPP’s 166,340. The latter won on a plurality of votes, but with a minority of parliamentary seats – 32, against 33 for the APNU+AFC.
However, in 2015, when the voters’ list jumped upwards by a whopping 107,948 voters, the PPP romped home with 202,694 votes or 36,354 more than it had received in 2011. “It is evident that the padding of the list benefitted the PPP and, without more, the “phantoms” came out to vote for this party,” Nagamootoo said.
The PM’s assertions come on the heels of the House-to-house registration wind -up, that was ordered by newly-appointed Chairperson of the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM), Justice (Retired) Claudette Singh. The data gathered from the registration process will be merged with the National Register of Registrants Database (NRRDB), from which the Official List of Electors (OLE) will be drawn.
