The impact of Mr Vincent Alexander’s letter published in this newspaper on Thursday was the equivalent in the physical universe of being hit by a rock from the asteroid belt. Mr Alexander is a commissioner of Gecom, and it is already in the public domain that his vigilance thwarted the declaration of an incorrect result for the 2011 election as a consequence of an ‘error’ on the part of Chief Election Officer Gocool Boodoo.
The assumption has always been, however, that that ‘error’ constituted some kind of arithmetical miscalculation, but for the first time Mr Alexander made public the sequence of events whereby he had alerted his fellow commissioners and Mr Boodoo to a wrong result. Had that result been allowed to stand, it would have given the PPP/C an additional seat and the overall majority which they crave.
Mr Alexander explained, however, that there was no miscounting of the votes; what Mr Boodoo had done was change the formula for converting votes into seats. He went on to describe how no actual calculations were presented to the Commission for its scrutiny; “signed declarations were presented.” If, for the sake of argument, therefore, Mr Alexander had not been present, it is not inconceivable that the other commissioners would not have discerned the fatal flaw, and a wrong declaration would have been made. Had that happened, the only recourse would have been to the courts, which may or may not have been dilatory in their hearing of the case, and may or may not have produced an outcome reflecting the will of the people.
Mr Alexander was able to pick up what the other Commissioners did not, not because as already mentioned there were any figures to check, but because of his “academic knowledge” of the system, and the fact that he was constantly explaining it to students. He went on to refer to a “sustained exchange” with Mr Boodoo before the correct formula was applied and the correct result obtained. Mr Alexander’s argument in his letter is that this was not a “mistake” on the part of the Chief Elections Officer; “how could it be a mistake,” he wrote, “if a factor in the formula is changed?” This was not the first time either the Chief Elections Officer had undertaken this exercise, said the Commissioner, it was the third, and that “he had already used the same formulation to correctly calculate the allocation of seats for the ten constituencies (regions).”
Everything that needed to be said with regard to Mr Boodoo’s contract was said in SN’s editorial of Monday, July 8. This latest revelation, however, brings an urgency to the resolution of the issue. It has become possible to deal with the matter now because last week Chief Justice Ian Chang discharged an order he had made preventing Gecom from renewing the contract of the Chief Election Officer unless it had followed the procedures established for the renewal of contracts for its senior employees. Mr Boodoo had moved to the court because the commissioners originally nominated by the opposition did not intend to renew his contract.
The gravamen of Mr Alexander’s charge – ie, that a factor in the formula was changed ‒ has not been challenged, and nor can one see how it could be, since the whole episode took place in the presence of the full commission. Given that, there are only two possibilities here: either Mr Boodoo deliberately changed a factor in the formula, or he made an egregious error when he was applying the formula to the results. If it was the former, then no further elaboration is necessary. If it was the latter, however, then it would bespeak a level of carelessness or incompetence which is incompatible with the role of a Chief Election Officer.
And as was pointed out in last week’s editorial and in Mr Alexander’s letter, this is not the first time an error has been made in a national election. In 2006, a Region 10 seat occupied by Prime Minister Samuel Hinds should have gone to the AFC, although this would not have affected the overall distribution of seats in the National Assembly. For his part, Mr Alexander alleged that there had been time to rectify the error, but that this had not been done, and instead it was suggested that the AFC seek redress in the courts. When the case was eventually heard, it was dismissed on technical grounds.
In the case of the 2011 election, Mr Boodoo has to take responsibility for the ‘mistake,’ since he was the only person responsible for converting votes into seats; while in the case of the 2006 election, as the head of the team responsible for tallying the votes, he should take responsibility too for what went wrong. There is no Chief Election Officer in any genuine democracy anywhere in the world who could survive this.
Guyana’s election processes and results are always blanketed in suspicion; there is no trust between the two major parties especially. If the elections machinery has even the appearance of being compromised, there will be no faith by one side or the other in the outcome. In our Friday edition we reported the opposition as saying that this was the end of the line for Mr Boodoo as far as being Chief Election Officer was concerned; they simply would not accede to a renewal of his contract. As a matter of fact, all the commissioners, whether originally nominated by the opposition or not, should not have been prepared to entertain a contract renewal if they were seriously committed to a true democracy where in an election the will of the people is paramount. Anything which thwarts that will, even if it is only a ‘mistake,’ is a cause for major concern.
Last week we reported Mr Boodoo’s lawyer as saying that he would analyse the situation and decide whether to refile. One hopes that Mr Boodoo does not decide to go that route, even if it is possible. Owing to the consequences which would follow should he – for the sake of argument – win the action, he should really pause for thought in the interest of the nation. No matter what his intentions were in the two elections mentioned above, half the commissioners have lost confidence in him, as well as more than half the nation.
Ideally, in order to spare himself exposure to further obloquy and the commission more confusion at a time when local government elections should be hovering on the horizon, he should abandon his attempt to seek contract renewal. It is his most painless route to an exit from Gecom.
