GECOM’s opposition seats, the arithmetic of a fair allocation, and the reform the moment invites

 

Commentary · Institutional Design & Governance

GECOM’s opposition seats, the arithmetic of a fair allocation, and the reform the moment invites.

By Terrence Richard Blackman, Ph.D. · June 21, 2026

I. The Constitutional Dispute

The composition of the Guyana Elections Commission has become the subject of a difficult constitutional dispute — one that bears directly on public confidence in the institution charged with administering the nation’s elections. The Guyana Business Journal offers the following analysis not in support of any party or personality, but in the interest of a durable and principled resolution: one grounded in the structure of the Constitution and in the settled mathematics of representation. A Commission’s authority rests in large part on its being seen to reflect the political community it serves. How its seats are allocated is, for that reason, a matter of national rather than partisan concern.

The relevant facts are not in dispute. The September 2025 general election returned the governing party to office and reconfigured the opposition benches. Among the opposition parties, We Invest in Nationhood holds sixteen seats in the National Assembly, A Partnership for National Unity twelve, and Forward Guyana one.^[1] The three opposition-nominated seats on the Commission, however, are presently occupied by commissioners identified by APNU at the time it was the principal opposition. The first-placed opposition party now holds none of those seats; the second-placed party holds all three. It is the distance between the Assembly’s composition and the Commission’s that lies at the center of the impasse, alongside a related procedural question — whether the Commission may properly act pending the full seating of Parliament — on which the Chair has taken a cautious position.

Two positions have hardened around the dispute. One holds that the new Leader of the Opposition is entitled to replace all three commissioners with nominees of his own party. The other holds that the sitting commissioners cannot be disturbed at all. Each, we suggest, passes over the principle the Constitution itself supplies.

II. The Seats Are Representational

The opposition seats on GECOM are, by design, representational. The logic of the Carter formula carried into Article 161 — three commissioners advised by the government, three by the opposition, beneath a chair drawn from a consensual list — is that the Commission should reflect the political balance of the country whose elections it superintends.^[2] The constitutional text is specific on the point: the President acts on the advice of the Leader of the Opposition only after meaningful consultation with the non-governmental political parties represented in the National Assembly. The seats are intended to track the opposition’s composition.

If that is so, then neither of the hardened positions follows from the design. The seats are not the personal entitlement of whoever leads the opposition, to be cleared and refilled at will; nor are they a freehold vested permanently in their present occupants irrespective of the electorate’s verdict. The proper question is narrower and more answerable: given the opposition’s composition, what does each party’s standing entitle it to? That is a question of apportionment, and apportionment is a subject on which the mathematics is settled.

III. The Arithmetic of Apportionment

Set the two parties’ realistic claims side by side. Sixteen seats to twelve is a ratio of four to three, and the task is to distribute three seats in that proportion. This is among the oldest problems in the theory of representation, and it has the unusual virtue of a clear answer: the standard methods agree.

Two seats to the larger opposition party and one to the smaller. The exact proportional shares are 1.71 and 1.29 seats; the larger party’s claim to a second seat is strong, and the smaller party’s claim to one seat is secure. No standard method yields any other division. Forward Guyana’s single Assembly seat corresponds to roughly one-tenth of a commissioner — below the level that any largest-remainder or divisor method would seat, where only three places are available — though its constitutional entitlement to be consulted is unaffected.

A two-to-one allocation is therefore not a figure chosen for convenience or split between rival demands. It is what proportional representation, applied to the present numbers, produces.

IV. What Proportion Indicates

Measured against that benchmark, the three possible allocations sit at different distances from the result the electorate produced. A division of zero to three — the present arrangement — departs furthest from proportion, assigning the whole of the opposition’s representation to the party that finished second among the opposition. A division of three to zero departs in the opposite direction, assigning to the largest opposition party a share beyond what its numbers support. A division of two to one corresponds to the Assembly as the voters composed it.

The point is not to assign fault but to identify the allocation most likely to command confidence. A Commission whose opposition seats reflect the opposition’s actual standing is more readily accepted by all sides than one that over- or under-represents any party, and the body’s effectiveness depends on that acceptance. The course most consistent with both the Constitution’s representational design and the Commission’s own legitimacy is the proportional one, reached through the consultation the text already requires.

V. Authority and Discretion

A question of authority sits alongside the question of allocation, and here the most carefully argued contribution to the public debate has come from the University of Guyana’s Neville Bissember. He observes that the relevant constitutional provisions speak of “the Leader of the Opposition” as an office rather than a person: wherever the phrase appears, it denotes whoever holds that office at the material time. On that reading, the advice power under Article 161 now belongs to the present Leader of the Opposition, and commissioners advised by a predecessor cannot be taken to stand for a parliamentary bloc that did not nominate them. The illustration he offers is difficult to resist: were the electoral outcome reversed, few would contend that commissioners advised by a former Leader of the Opposition retained their places once the office had passed to another.

Granting that the authority rests with the present Leader of the Opposition, however, leaves open the question this commentary is concerned with — the principle by which that authority should be exercised. The discretion is not unbounded. The same provision conditions the Leader’s advice on meaningful consultation with the non-governmental parties represented in the Assembly, which places APNU and Forward Guyana, by the Constitution’s own terms, within the process. The authority to identify the nominees belongs to the Leader of the Opposition; the proportion of seats allocated is determined by the result, not by preference. Both considerations point to the same two-to-one division.

VI. Representatives or Nominees

A further question underlies the whole dispute: whether commissioners are best understood as representatives of the parties that nominate them or as independent members who, once appointed, serve the electorate as a whole. Commissioner Vincent Alexander has advanced the latter view, and it deserves to be taken seriously, for it bears directly on whether a change in the opposition’s composition touches the seats at all.

What is worth noticing is that the conclusion is the same under either understanding. If commissioners are genuinely independent and carry no party’s mandate, then no party holds a proprietary claim to a seat, and refreshing the nominees to reflect the new opposition raises no objection of principle. If, on the other hand, commissioners function as representatives of their nominating parties — as the structure of the formula assumes, and as the Carter Center found in its preliminary statement on the September 2025 election, observing that the commissioners are widely perceived as acting for their parties rather than for the interests of all stakeholders — then the allocation should follow the parties’ present standing.^[3] The characterization need not be settled to resolve the matter; both roads lead to an allocation that reflects the opposition’s current composition.

VII. Removal, Expiry, and Permanence

The legal contest is often framed around removal. Article 161(6) applies the protections of Article 225 to the Commission, so that a commissioner, like a judge, may not be removed except for cause — infirmity or misbehavior. From this, it is argued that, absent cause, no change may occur. The reply advanced by Mr. Bissember and others is that the question is not removal but expiry: the appointments were made within, and for a two-party opposition, and when the opposition was reconfigured and a new Leader was produced, the basis on which they rested came to an end. On that view, Article 225, which governs removal, does not reach a term that has simply run its course.

“A reasonable reading distinguishes the permanence of the body from the tenure of its members.” — Terrence Richard Blackman, Ph.D.

The stronger version of the contrary argument rests not on Article 225 but on permanence. The Constitution (Amendment) Act No. 2 of 2000 re-enacted Article 161 and, for the first time, established GECOM as a standing body rather than one assembled for each election, with no fixed term and, in the Commission’s own description, left the commissioners’ tenure unspecified. That history is real and should be acknowledged plainly: no provision ends a commissioner’s service upon a change in the opposition’s leadership. It is worth observing, however, that the 2000 reform made the institution permanent — a continuous secretariat and standing machinery, in place of the earlier practice of dissolving and reconstituting the Commission each cycle. Whether that institutional permanence was intended to convert each party-nominated seat into a tenure unaffected by the disappearance of the party basis on which it was filled is a distinct question, and a reasonable reading distinguishes the permanence of the body from the tenure of its members. These are the genuine interpretive questions, and they are ones on which the courts, or a clarifying constitutional provision, may ultimately be required to pronounce.

VIII. The Reform the Moment Invites

Whatever the immediate resolution, the recurring difficulty is structural. A commission composed of three government and three opposition nominees, with no independent members and no fixed terms, was a serviceable compromise for the breakthrough election of 1992, but it was a settlement built around two dominant parties. The arrival of a genuine third force in the Assembly is precisely the circumstance it was not designed to absorb, which is why an ordinary change in the opposition’s composition has produced a constitutional impasse.

A constructive comparison lies close to hand. Jamaica, whose elections were once more troubled than Guyana’s, rebuilt its electoral commission around two features Guyana’s lacks. It seats independent members alongside the party nominees — enough to hold the balance, so that no partisan bloc can deadlock the body — while treating the nominees candidly as the party representatives they are. And it fixes terms, four years for nominated members and seven for the selected, so that tenure expires on a schedule rather than continuing indefinitely. The Carter Center, which originated the formula Guyana adopted, has for the better part of a decade recommended that Guyana move in a similar direction, toward greater independence and a structure less exposed to partisan deadlock.^[3] The present difficulty is the clearest argument yet for taking that recommendation up, ideally through the Constitutional Reform Commission, so that the Commission’s composition tracks the result of each election as a matter of design rather than being contested afresh each cycle.

IX. In the National Interest

Two conclusions follow. In the near term, the Constitution’s representational design and the consultation it already requires point toward an allocation of two opposition seats to the larger party and one to the smaller — the division that reflects the electorate’s verdict and is therefore most likely to command the confidence on which the Commission depends. In the longer term, the episode is an invitation to structural reform: fixed terms and a measure of genuine independence, on the model of Jamaica and in line with long-standing expert recommendations, would spare the country recurring crises each time its politics realign.

A proportional settlement has a further merit worth noting. It is an outcome on which the contending parties could converge without either being seen to surrender, because it follows not from the preference of one side but from a rule neither chose and neither can reasonably reject. In a matter where the credibility of the electoral system is itself at stake, that is no small thing. The arithmetic is straightforward; the larger task is the willingness to be guided by it, and to build an institution that will not require the calculation to be fought over again.

---

References

1. National Assembly of the Parliament of Guyana. Composition of the National Assembly following the September 2025 General Election. Georgetown: Parliament of Guyana, 2025.
2. Constitution of the Co-operative Republic of Guyana, Article 161. Appointment of members of the Elections Commission. Georgetown: Government of Guyana.
3. The Carter Center. Preliminary Statement on the September 2025 General and Regional Elections in Guyana. Atlanta: The Carter Center, 2025.

---

Supported By

We are grateful for the partnership and support of individuals and organisations committed to advancing Guyanese and Caribbean development and human capital investment. Sponsors support the GBJ Sunday Essay as a whole; they play no role in commissioning, reviewing, or approving its content, and the analysis and conclusions are solely the author’s.

Individual Supporters Courtney Allen | All Te Networks | Corine Locke | Tony Harris | Roderick Alsopp | Dr. Michelle Luard | Clarence Bone

🇬🇾 Please support the Guyana Business Journal & Magazine today