Following his controversial declaration of results, Region Four Returning Officer (RO) Clairmont Mingo has denied the requests by eight of the ten parties that contested the March 2 general and regional elections for recounts, while saying that none of their counting agents was properly appointed.
The request for a recount can only be made by a party counting agent.
The Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) yesterday confirmed that requests were received for general recount from A New and United Guyana, Change Guyana, the Liberty and Justice Party, the Organization of Victory of the People, the People’s Progressive Party/Civic, the People’s Republic Party, the Citizenship Initiative and The New Movement. Only the incumbent APNU+AFC, which is projected to win the polls based on the count, and the United Republican Party, whose leader has voiced his belief that votes were stolen, did not request recounts.
“RO denied requests for recount since none of the parties adhered to the statutory timeline for the appointment of counting agents,” a GECOM advisory stated.
“In this regard, no counting agent was duly appointed for any parties and only a counting agent can request a recount,” it further explained.
The law stipulates that a counting agent is to be named seven days before the polls.
The process used by Mingo to tabulate the votes from the region’s polling stations has been under scrutiny since he purported to make a declaration on March 5 that was subsequently invalidated by the court. The process used on Friday triggered fresh accusations of attempts to manipulate the electoral process.
‘Egregiously flawed’
The Citizenship Initiative (TCI) Presidential Candidate Rondha-Ann Lam yesterday dubbed the process “so egregiously flawed that the result cannot be taken to be in itself an accurate representation of the will of the people.”
In a statement, Lam said there were “glaring discrepancies in the process” that made the final results an unreliable and inaccurate indicator of the will of the people.
She cited Mingo for engaging in an “active dereliction of his duty” as RO and charged that he had carried out his statutory obligations in contempt of the general judgment and specific declaration of Chief Justice (ag) Roxane George-Wiltshire. “The Citizenship Initiative therefore believes that the process yesterday was so flawed and tainted that the last logical next step to restore any credibility to these elections is that a recount has to be undertaken and in full public scrutiny beginning from the unsealing of the ballot boxes to the final, credible declaration of the results,” Lam declared, while urging GECOM Chairperson Justice Claudette Singh to ensure that a recount, as she has committed to, take place.
In detailing irregularities, Lam noted that Mingo attempted to use a spreadsheet in contravention of the judge’s orders to use certified Statements of Poll (SOPs) in the ascertaining of votes.
She said when this was opposed, he then resorted to a clerk reading out from what he purported to be SOPs but which were not visible to any eligible person there, including both observers and candidates. “The numbers he called for polling stations which information (via photographs of SOPs) were in our position did not match our information. He denied both candidates and observer requests to view the SOPs directly,” she pointed out.
Later, Lam said, instead of arranging for video-equipment in the Ashmin’s building to view and project the SOPs that his clerk was reading from, he stopped the process for over two hours and announced that he would be moving the operations to a location with better media facilities, although the facility had a fully functioning media centre capable of fulfilling the declaration of the judge.
According to Lam, when the process was re-sumed at GECOM’s headquarters, the SOPs scanned and projected appeared to be photocopies of SOPs, the projected images were blurry, the projector some distance away from where observers and candidates sat, and there were no clear signatures on the documents projected. “More importantly, numbers on many of the purported SOPs appeared to be doctored and were again not in concord with the independently sourced SOPs in our possession,” she added, before later noting that every single international observer mission, bar none has commented upon and condemned GECOM’s conduct over the past week.
Meanwhile, Change Guyana Presidential Candidate Robert Badal did not mince words in calling the results for the region “rigged,” while adding that they had taken the cloak off the “claim of honesty and independence” of GECOM.
“This is no surprise as events before and after the elections pointed to substantial evidence of intention to influence the results. The lack of transparency, denying contesting parties the opportunity to verify statements of polls (SOPs), glaring discrepancies on SOPs, disregard and mistreatment of reputable election observers and their eventual withdrawal from the process on account of a flawed process, all confirm their intention to declare APNU as the winner, whatever the odds,” Badal said in a statement, where he added that the authors of this state of affairs must be mindful of the consequences of this death of electoral democracy in Guyana.
“Their every action, every step of the way, has been in clear view of the international community who have already spoken in one voice, that no illegitimate Government will have their support in this region. This would mean various sanctions, financial and otherwise, against those responsible, personally and on the Government they form, including withdrawal of diplomatic status,” he added.
Badal said the full brunt of these pressures will ultimately be felt by the mass of ordinary Guyanese.
“Unfortunately the architects of this chaos are unmindful of these consequences in their thirsty quest for power. This is a sad day for our country that will linger in our minds for decades to come, just as the rigged elections in the 70s and 80s did. We hope better sense prevail to avoid the worst,” he added.
