GUYANA | Electoral Integrity Under Siege: Guyana's Voter Registration Scandal

GEORGETOWN, Guyana, March 6, 2025 - In a startling discovery that threatens to undermine Guyana's democratic foundations, a single address in Ogle now houses 110 newly registered voters—all foreign nationals—as the country hurtles toward its contentious 2025 General and Regional Elections.

This revelation, just the tip of an electoral iceberg, has thrown the nation's voting system into disarray and ignited fears of widespread manipulation.

The Guyana Trades Union Congress (GTUC) has unearthed a suspicious anomaly that defies statistical probability: Polling Division #414115 at Ogle Sugar Estate has exploded from just 9 registered voters in 2020 to 119 in 2025.

More alarming still, 110 of these new registrants share a single address—Lot 5A Ogle, East Coast Demerara—a barrack-style accommodation typically housing transient workers rather than permanent residents.

"This isn't just irregular, it's impossible," declared GTUC General Secretary Lincoln Lewis, whose organization's investigation revealed that these 110 male foreign nationals—ranging from civil engineers to laborers—appear in sequential identification number blocks on the Preliminary List of Electors (PLE) for January 2025.

This pattern strongly suggests a coordinated mass registration rather than legitimate individual enrollments.

The Table below is an extract from GECOM’s Preliminary List of Electors:

The Ogle anomaly scratches only the surface of what appears to be a systemic electoral crisis.

Guyana's Official List of Electors (OLE) now boasts 738,484 registered voters—an astronomical figure representing nearly 89 percent of the country's total population of 826,353 as estimated by the World Health Organization in 2023.

Such a percentage defies demographic reality, given that a significant portion of Guyana's population remains under voting age.

President of the GTUC Norris Witter has called for  the presentation of a detailed list of all Commonwealth foreign nationals residing in Guyana. He said the requested data must be broken down by nationality to ensure transparency in the electoral process.

Witter told  a press conference on  Tuesday at the Critchlow Labour Collegein Georgetown, of his concerns raised last December about the integrity of the voters’ list, which he said has grown from 660,000 electors in  2020 to over 738,000 as published in the Preliminary List of Electors this month.

Further clouding the electoral landscape is the governing People's Progressive Party's (PPP) conspicuous delay in releasing the 2022 National Population and Housing Census results. Despite promises from the Guyana Bureau of Statistics for a preliminary report by late 2024,

February 2025 has arrived with the data still under wraps—a maneuver that many analysts view as deliberately calculated to prevent independent verification of the country's actual population and the extent of voter list inflation.

The opposition's response has been swift and unified: delay the elections by up to a year to conduct a fresh house-to-house registration exercise and implement biometric voter verification systems. Such measures would purge the rolls of deceased voters, duplicates, and fraudulent entries while preventing common electoral abuses like voter impersonation and multiple voting.

Yet these reasonable proposals have hit a brick wall. Both the PPP government and the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) have flatly rejected these safeguards, with GECOM Chairperson Retired Justice Claudette Singh dismissing biometric verification as "not feasible" due to purported time and resource constraints—a justification that rings hollow in a nation awash with new oil wealth.

Singh's leadership at GECOM has drawn increasing fire from political analysts who question her impartiality. Critics point to her history of decisions that benefited the PPP during the controversial 2020 elections, including her refusal to address concerns about the recount process. Her current resistance to electoral reforms has only reinforced perceptions that she serves as an instrument of PPP interests rather than as guardian of electoral integrity.

As Guyana stands at this democratic crossroads, the refusal to cleanse voter lists or implement basic electoral safeguards casts an ominous shadow over the upcoming elections. The suspicious voter inflation at Ogle Sugar Estate appears less an isolated incident and more a glimpse into a broader strategy to manipulate the electoral system to favor the governing party.

While opposition calls for election delays to implement proper voter registration and verification systems represent a reasonable path forward, the entrenched resistance from both the PPP regime and GECOM suggests that Guyana may be careening toward another contentious and potentially fraudulent electoral process.

The ultimate question looming over this resource-rich nation is stark and unavoidable: Will Guyanese citizens passively watch as their democratic rights are systematically undermined, or will they demand electoral integrity from an administration seemingly determined to maintain power at any cost

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