GECOM’s Non-Answer: How a “Conclusive Statement” Ducked the One Question It Was Asked

 GECOM’s Non-Answer: How a “Conclusive Statement” Ducked the One Question It Was Asked

ANALYSISY BY : Editor– AUGUST,2026   

The Elections Commission Secretariat says it has no authority to rule on the Article 161(3)(b) impasse. But its own abstention is not neutral — it is a default ruling for indefinite tenure, and neither camp in the underlying constitutional debate has supplied a mechanism to fill the gap it leaves open.

The Guyana Elections Commission’s Secretariat yesterday issued what it plainly intended as a closing word on two festering disputes — the standoff over opposition-nominated Commissioners under Article 161(3)(b), and the parallel fight over opposition scrutineers. On the Commissioner question, GECOM said it has no legal authority to determine the validity of nominations made by the Leader of the Opposition, and that it cannot intervene in, adjudicate upon, or resolve any impasse involving persons he has nominated.

That is not a conclusion. It is a recusal — and recusal, in a standoff where one side already holds the seats, is not a neutral act. It is a ruling for the status quo, issued without GECOM having to own it as one.

THE THEORY GECOM DECLINED TO TOUCH

The constitutional debate GECOM stepped around has a name and a leading proponent: University of Guyana law lecturer Neville Bissember, whose position is that “the Leader of the Opposition” in Article 161(3)(b) denotes an office, not a person. Wherever the phrase appears in the Constitution, it refers to whoever presently holds that office — which means the advice power the clause vests is a live, current power, not one frozen in the hands of whoever exercised it last. On this reading, three Commissioners nominated by a predecessor Opposition Leader, for a parliamentary opposition configuration that no longer exists, cannot be taken to represent a bloc that never nominated them.

Bissember’s rebuttal to the “life tenure” argument is careful, and worth stating precisely. Article 161(6) imports the removal protections of Article 225 — a Commissioner “shall not be removed therefrom or suspended from the functions thereof” absent cause such as infirmity or misconduct. Defenders of the sitting Commissioners — Vincent Alexander, Charles Corbin, and Desmond Trotman, all APNU-nominated — cite this as an ironclad shield. Bissember’s answer is that the question is not removal at all. It is expiry. The appointments were made within, and for, a specific opposition configuration; when that configuration was reconfigured by the 2025 election and produced a new Leader of the Opposition, the basis on which the appointments rested came to an end on its own terms. Article 225 governs cause-based removal. It was never built to answer whether a mandate has simply run its course.

Bissember offers a test to sharpen the point: reverse the 2025 result. Had the WIN-led coalition instead formed the government, with Bharrat Jagdeo or President Ali holding the office of Leader of the Opposition, few would seriously argue that Commissioners nominated by a PPP predecessor should remain in their seats once the office had passed to another party entirely.

If permanence is the rule, it has to hold in both directions — not just the direction that happens to keep the current occupants in place.

THE QUESTION BISSEMBER’S OWN LOGIC DOES NOT ANSWER

Push that reversed scenario one step further than Bissember does, and it stops being a rhetorical device and starts exposing a real structural hole.

If the 2025 outcome had gone the other way — Mohamed elected President, Jagdeo or Ali installed as Leader of the Opposition — what, on Bissember’s own reasoning, happens to Alexander, Corbin, and Trotman?

Would Norton still be saying “no vacancy ” exists here ?

They could not remain opposition Commissioners. Their mandate, by Bissember’s own account, would have expired the moment the office passed to a Leader who never nominated them and owes their appointment nothing. But they could not become government Commissioners either. Article 161(3)(a) vests the three government-side seats in the President’s own deliberate judgment — a wholly separate appointment power, textually and procedurally distinct from the advice mechanism in 161(3)(b). Nothing in the Constitution allows a sitting opposition-nominated Commissioner to migrate seats when the political wind changes. There is no clause that converts an opposition nominee into a presidential appointee by operation of law.

So in the reversed scenario, on the very logic that says their mandate expired, Alexander, Corbin and Trotman would hold no seat on the Commission at all — not the one they were nominated to, which has expired, and not the other one, which they were never appointed to and have no constitutional path into.

That is the right answer as a matter of principle. It is also the answer nobody currently arguing this dispute — not Bissember, not GECOM’s own Chairperson, not the Secretariat’s statement issued this past week  — has actually operationalized. Expiry-in-principle is not the same as a mechanism that empties the seat.

Attorney  Ralph Ramkarran has come closest to naming the gap honestly: he argues Commissioners in this position ought, as a moral imperative and a matter of standard political practice, to resign when the nominating office changes hands. That is candidly not a constitutional compulsion. It is an appeal to conscience, offered precisely because no one has found a provision that does the job automatically.

Into that gap steps the argument actually being run today by the sitting Commissioners and their defenders: there is no vacancy, and without a vacancy, there is nothing for the President to appoint anyone to — regardless of whose theory of Article 161(3)(b) is correct. It does not matter, on this account, whether Alexander’s mandate expired in principle in September 2025. He has not resigned. No court has ordered his removal. No constitutional amendment has intervened. The seat, mechanically, is occupied, and occupied seats do not create vacancies by force of academic argument.

This is the trap Bissember’s framework — for all its textual discipline — has not yet escaped, and the trap the reversed-election hypothetical makes undeniable: a theory of expiry without an accompanying mechanism of vacation is not a resolution. It is a description of a problem, dressed as an answer to it.

GECOM’S ABSTENTION IS NOT NEUTRAL

This is precisely the terrain GECOM’s Secretariat chose to avoid entirely, framing its non-answer as a jurisdictional limit rather than a substantive position. The Commission says it cannot adjudicate the impasse. It does not say why an “impasse” exists in the first place, or acknowledge that its own inaction is what allows one side of that impasse — the incumbent, APNU-nominated Commissioners — to remain in place indefinitely, by default, without GECOM ever having to defend that outcome as correct.

This is not a hypothetical asymmetry. It is the operating reality right now. The Commission’s own Chairperson, Justice (ret’d) Claudette Singh, has previously taken a position closer to Bissember’s — that the Commission could not properly reconstitute itself on the opposition side until a new Leader of the Opposition was named and had submitted fresh nominees. The Secretariat’s statement yesterday does not engage that position, endorse it, or explain why it no longer governs. It simply declares the entire question outside GECOM’s remit.

A constitutional commission that will not say who is validly seated on it, while continuing to pay and convene those already seated, has not stayed neutral. It has chosen an outcome and called it an absence of one., 

THE SAME PATTERN, PLAYING OUT AGAIN ON SCRUTINEERS

The Secretariat’s statement did something similar, in miniature, on the scrutineer question. GECOM confirmed it is currently remunerating 69 scrutineers appointed by APNU+AFC, while WIN has separately submitted its own list of nominees for opposition scrutineer positions. The Secretariat was careful to say the existing arrangement should not be read as a determination that WIN is not entitled to representation — while simultaneously conceding that the Commission will, at some point, have to make a determination on the matter. It has not made one. In the meantime, the arrangement inherited from the prior opposition configuration continues to be funded and operated, exactly as with the Commissioners.

The Secretariat did rule on one narrower point: the Chief Election Officer has no independent authority to alter the existing scrutineer arrangement or implement WIN’s list unilaterally, because the CEO is, notwithstanding anything in any written law, subject to the direction and control of the Commission itself. That is a correct statement of the chain of authority. But it does not resolve anything — it simply relocates the unanswered question from the CEO’s desk to the Commission’s, where it has now sat, unresolved, through two separate public disputes on two separate questions, both governed by the same underlying constitutional logic about who a change in the Opposition Leader’s office actually displaces.

WHAT A CONCLUSIVE STATEMENT WOULD ACTUALLY REQUIRE

GECOM did not conclude the Article 161(3)(b) impasse yesterday. It described its own unwillingness to conclude it, and it did so in language crafted to sound procedural rather than consequential. But the consequence is real: every day the Secretariat treats this as a matter for the Opposition Leader and the President alone to sort out between themselves, Alexander, Corbin, and Trotman continue to sit as Commissioners on nominations from an opposition configuration that, on a serious and carefully argued constitutional reading, ceased to exist in September 2025.

Resolving this properly requires more than GECOM restating its own limits. It requires either the courts to settle whether Article 161(3)(b) contains an implied mechanism of expiry, Parliament to legislate one where the Constitution is silent, or the Commission itself — not merely its Secretariat — to take up the question it insists it cannot touch.

Until one of those things happens, GECOM’s Wednesday statement will stand not as a resolution, but as a record of the moment the Commission chose institutional convenience over the constitutional question actually before it.

— The Board