When Stanley Marcus, the Guyana Elections Commission’s (GECOM) lawyer, told the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) on Monday that the entity would not be ready for elections before Christmas, Justice Winston Anderson posed a crucial question — If more resources were dedicated to accelerating the preparation process, how soon could GECOM be ready?
At that time, Marcus could not provide a definitive answer. But the Guyana Standard was able to secure some clarity on this matter from GECOM Commissioner Vincent Alexander. During an exclusive interview, the official explained that normally, house-to-house registration takes almost nine months. Due to the passed no-confidence motion, efforts were made to compress the exercise and increase the number of people involved.
“We didn’t start the exercise in June as we had planned because we had issues with procurement. If we didn’t have those issues, the November deadline which we had previously advised the President of would have remained. Now that that is cleared up, we are projected to start house-to-house registration in July,” Alexander stated.
The GECOM Commissioner stressed that around 9,000 individuals would have been trained already for this process and it is in excess of what the Commission normally has for that exercise. “To compress this process further would be to compromise it,” he concluded.
