Dear Editor,
I refer to various GECOM Public Service Announcements (PSAs) informing that citizens ‘…from a Commonwealth country living in Guyana for one year or more (immediately prior to December 31, 2026 [sic.]) can make a Claim to entry on the Official List of Electors (OLE) on or before January 18, 2026’. This information is misleading and perpetuates a misrepresentation of the situation relating to the eligibility of Commonwealth citizens other than Guyanese to participate in elections in Guyana.
Article 159 of the Guyana Constitution, entitled “Qualifications and disqualifications for electors”, states inter alia, in section (2)(b) that ‘…a person shall be qualified to be registered as an elector if…on the qualifying date, he or she…is a Commonwealth citizen…who is domiciled and resident in Guyana and has been so resident for a period of one year immediately preceding the qualifying date’. In this instance, the qualifying date is December 31, 2025, notwithstanding the obvious error in the PSA of 31 December 2026.
To the keyboard warriors on social media, the soi-disant constitutional law experts who have crawled out of the woodwork over the past several months, those for whom literacy is a challenge, and finally for whosoever is responsible for the content of this GECOM PSA, I ask that you lend me your eyes: Article 159(2)(b) in fact contains two sets of information – it tells you which Commonwealth citizens other than Guyanese are qualified to vote (as the title of the Article states, an elector is a voter), and it tells you what those persons have to do to in order to be able to register to vote.
For whatever reason(s), GECOM has apparently misread Article 159(2)(b), completely assimilating the two separate pieces of information into one criterion of residency for a year immediately preceding the qualifying date. What the provision in fact says is that firstly and, more importantly, for a Commonwealth citizen who is not a Guyanese to vote, they had to have been domiciled and resident in Guyana; in addition, they had to have been resident in Guyana in the year immediately preceding the date of registration, in order to be eligible to be included on the OLE. In other words residency alone does not suffice; rather the requirement is residency but as a component of domicile and, concomitantly, residency in the year immediately prior to registration.
It is for this reason that the draftsman included the words ‘and has been SO resident for a period of one year immediately preceding the qualifying date’, thereby linking the residency period for registration with ‘domiciled and resident’ (‘so resident’); respectfully, the one cannot be read in isolation of the other.
Domicile is a technical legal term for which residence is only one component; it includes aspects such as the acquisition of property, investments, relocation of family and the technical criteria of an intention in the language of the Domicile Reform Act ‘…to live indefinitely’ in Guyana and not to return to one’s country of origin. In other words a student from another Commonwealth country studying medicine, or a truck driver on a three-year contract would hardly have become domiciled in Guyana and so would not be qualified to be an elector, even if they were resident in the year immediately preceding the date of registration, as the GECOM PSA misleadingly advises.
To illustrate the problem, consider a Commonwealth citizen who moves to Guyana for employment, falls in love with the people, our hospitality, our climate, our cuisine, and doesn’t mind the hooligans on the road and the terrible customer service in “Guydubai”. After working for two years, his family joins him, the wife soon becomes an official in a local church and the children enroll in school and various extra-curricular activities, one of them even qualifying to play on the national squad. After ten years, he applies for a mortgage to build a house and sends for his mother-in-law. The adults in this family unit which has uprooted itself from the country of origin and decides to live and work indefinitely in Guyana, would have in the process most likely made Guyana their country of domicile. However to be eligible to vote, they would still have to show that they are resident in Guyana in the year immediately preceding the registration of electors.
This is not an exact science: using my own example, I have lived in different countries for varying periods of time, in one case as long as nine years in Belgium but have always harboured the intention to return to my country of birth – hence my place of domicile has always been Guyana.
Furthermore, that family unit might temporarily relocate to the UK because the Commonwealth citizen won a three-year job contract there. Upon completion, they return to Guyana, their country of domicile. For the adults to vote in elections here, even though Guyana had become their place of domicile, they would still have to wait a year before they can register to vote.
By only referring to the residency requirement of one year immediately prior to the registration date, GECOM is allowing Commonwealth citizens to register to vote who are ‘not so qualified’, to use the language of Article 159(2). That could have all kinds of consequences for the accuracy of the voters list and consequently the integrity of any elections held and ultimately, the result.
The reality is that domicile is not emblazoned on the forehead of someone and so is not something that a GECOM registration staff can discern when a Commonwealth citizen walks in to a GECOM office. It is acquired over a period of time and in combination with other events and circumstances. Some countries like Pakistan or Indonesia, for example, do issue a Certificate of Domicile, but that would be a function more for the GRO than for GECOM; in such a case, upon presentation of such a certificate, not unlike a Guyanese with a Birth Certificate of Passport, the Commonwealth citizen who has decided to make the fastest growing economy in the Hemisphere his domicile of choice, could then be easily registered to vote.
Were the requirement of the issuance of a Certificate of Domicile be regarded as onerous, time wasting, unnecessary, bureaucratic – whatever be the objection – another option would be to do away altogether with the requirement of domicile, and utilize instead a more measurable yardstick such as residence in Guyana for an uninterrupted period of five to seven years – what is required to acquire Guyanese citizenship. Neither would the grant of Guyanese citizenship instead of domicile be the solution, even if the residency requirement for either were to be similar and was met; this is because some persons might want the right to vote in their country of domicile, without the right to citizenship; others may be precluded under their existing citizenship from acquiring a second citizenship without relinquishing the existing one.
Still others like my friend Rawle Blackman – whether or not he is a dual citizen – would have us “follow pattern” some Commonwealth nations and remove altogether from our Constitution the right of Commonwealth citizens other than Guyanese to vote. This of course would burn our bridges with the 56-member organisation, which has over the years stood firm with us in support in a number of critical areas – the Guyana-Venezuela controversy, technical assistance and cooperation in the areas such as legislative reform, youth empowerment, parliamentary and electoral scrutiny – a price which I respectfully believe is too high to pay. Squandering such political capital is much easier than rebuilding it.
I look forward to GECOM, the administration, the Constitutional Reform Commission – whoever – using the five years between now and the next election to fix this anomaly.