As both of the major political campaigns announced results favouring them at Monday’s polls, the Guyana Elections Commission (Gecom) yesterday came under growing pressure to release official results but both Chairman Dr Steve Surujbally and Chief Election Officer Keith Lowenfield maintained that they were bound to follow the process stipulated by law.
Up to early last evening, Gecom had only officially released results from 5% of the country’s 2,299 polling places, while Surujbally and Lowenfield could not commit to saying when final results would be announced and noted that some Statements of Poll (SoPs) have not yet been received because of inclement weather.
Surujbally yesterday stressed that by law the commission is the only body authorised to release the results and brushed aside concerns that the long wait for results may frustrate the electorate, while stating that Guyanese would have to be patient.
He emphasised that the commission would not go outside the ambit of the law, saying that if it takes time to get the results, the country must have the patience. “Anyone who is coming out at this stage and saying that his party has won is playing a dangerous game,” he said.
His comments, however, came in wake of statements released by both the incumbent PPP/C and the APNU+AFC campaigns, which each signaled victory based on their own internal counts.
Asked whether the commission had received official complaints from the PPP/C about alleged “skullduggery” during polling, both the chairman and the CEO responded in the negative. PPP/C officials have said that they had begun sending in complaints to the commission but Lowenfield said the only issues raised had to do with the disciplined services votes and that he had clarified these with the campaign.
After his last press briefing, Surujbally met with the heads of the western missions—the United States, Britain and Canada. The mission heads and other international observers have said that they found the process on Monday to be free, fair and credible and that any glitches would not affect the final tally in a significant way.
Saying that “everybody and their uncle” are giving results, Surujbally told reporters last evening that he was not negating the rightness and wrongness of the release of results but noted that the commission does not work according to the same rules as a
newspaper or political party. Stabroek News has been publishing results from individual Statements of Poll based on results gathered by reporters from around the country.
Surujbally said the commission has a higher standard to adhere to by law and added that if it were to do it “like the others, we would have very interesting results.”
The Guyana Human Rights Association (GHRA) publicly decried the slothful release of the results and said that while the electorate accepts that transparency and accuracy are unquestionably necessary, “people begin to lose patience when the precautions appear to be excessive.”
“This is particularly the case for a generation raised on cell-phones and the internet. Moreover, both major parties are being forced to take risks to placate their supporters by what comes across as self-absorbed posturing by Gecom,” it said in a press statement.
It added that after a long and generally unpleasant elections campaign, the last thing the Guyanese public need, at this point, is a prolonged and ill-tempered count. It appealed to Surujbally “to give highest priority to bringing this process to a swift, efficient and dignified conclusion.”
‘Stymied’
Lowenfield up to last evening said Gecom had processed statements from districts Three, Four, Five, Six and Ten and that statements from Nine had been received but were yet to be processed, while it had not received statements from districts One, Seven and Eight.
At the first of two press conferences yesterday, the commission had indicated that it would have started releasing preliminary results but it did not deliver. “When we come back we are going to have a lot more data to put on the screen,” Surujbally then promised. However, only 5% of the results was released.
According to Surujbally the commission was “stymied a bit” on Monday after the close of polls as there was an environment that frustrated the “healthy transmission of ballot boxes and statement of polls” but he added that the challenges were eventually overcome.
In defence of the commission, Surujbally said it follows the law of the country’s electoral system which it did not enact.
Not naming anyone—at that time both the major campaigns had issued statements indicating victory and which they later announced at press conferences—Surujbally declared that no one else but Gecom has the legal right to announce the winner. “That is a message that, in spite of all we have said, seems not to be getting over to certain people,” he said.
As of 11AM yesterday morning, the commission had gone through over 1,500 SoPs and by last evening Lowenfield said it had received 1,800 SoPs. He clarified that these include both the general and regional statements.
While Surujbally at that time had promised the media a “taste” of what was to come of the results, there was nothing to see. While the commission’s technical expert did briefly put up some results on a screen, the data was in a format that was too tiny to discern. While he was expected to go through a small amount of the data that he processed, the expert made it clear that the information he gave was not the official results.
Lowenfield yesterday morning said that statements of poll began going into the commission at around 11:15PM Monday night. He said while initially the receipt was slow, the process sped up during the course of the night.
He said the statements have to go through several layers of checks but added that the process was going smoothly. He revealed that inclement weather would have delayed the transport of some of the SoPs.
At that press conference government-nominated commissioner Sase Gunraj said there were one or two statements that had a few small errors that were immediately flagged. “But for the most part those statements of polls are passed as is to the CEO, who will have the responsibility for verification,” Gunraj, a lawyer, said.
“We have not had glaring errors. We have had, from what I have experienced a few arithmetic errors that makes a difference between one and two, not a difference between ten and twenty… I don’t think the number collectively could be considered to be glaring or the amount or the value of the error itself could be considered to be glaring but even in that instance those have been referred for corrections,” fellow commissioner Vincent Alexander added.
