With another admonition from CARICOM Chairperson Mia Mottley that a legitimate government depends on a transparent recount of votes from the March 2nd general elections, a three-member scrutineer team from the Community touched down here yesterday for a second attempt at resolving the country’s electoral crisis and a long-awaited start date for the process is expected to be set today.
Hours before the team disembarked from a chartered Trans Guyana Airways flight at the Eugene F. Correia International Airport at Ogle, Mottley, in a statement released by the Community, called “on all concerned to ensure a credible and transparent recount process in order to provide legitimacy to any government, which would be sworn in as a result.”
This process, she added, “must be completed without further delay”. The warning from Mottley, the Prime Minister of Barbados, further underlines the jeopardy for any illegally sworn-in government, a point that has also been repeatedly emphasised by the US, UK, Canada and the European Union as well as regional and international partners.
Mottley noted that the three-member Team is led by Cynthia Barrow-Giles, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Government at the University of the West Indies (UWI), and includes John Jarvis, Commissioner of the Antigua and Barbuda Electoral Commission and Sylvester King, Deputy Supervisor of Elections of St. Vincent and the Grenadines.
Barrow-Giles was a member of the five-member team which arrived for the aborted recount on March 15. She is the only member of that team to return as CARICOM has indicated that the other members were unavailable for the present mission, which is expected to last for 25 days.
The first attempt to recount the votes from the general elections had been aborted after a candidate of the incumbent APNU+AFC went to court to block it and succeeded in obtaining an injunction. Upon the collapse of the mission, Mottley had warned that there were forces here trying to prevent the counting of all of the ballots from the elections.
Jarvis and King were part of the 17-member CARICOM observer team which was in Guyana to monitor the general elections.
Mottley, on behalf of the Community, yesterday expressed gratitude to the Government of Canada for the “generous support it has provided to CARICOM for this initiative.”
Stabroek News understands that this support includes the cost of the flight, hotel and other expenses related to the team’s stay in Guyana.
“It is Canada’s privilege to be able to support this initiative and enable the CARICOM leadership to resolve an issue in the territory which houses its headquarters,” Canadian High Commissioner Lilian Chatterjee told Stabroek News yesterday in an invited comment.
She explained that as her country’s High Commissioner to Guyana and Ambassador to CARICOM, she is a friend to both.
“Canada has been very vocal about a need for credible and transparent results. We were disappointed that the efforts of the last [CARICOM] team were thwarted through a frivolous injunction and once the borders closed due to COVID-19 I sought to work closely with Secretary General Irwin LaRocque, who worked closely with CARICOM’s leadership, to get this process completed. It’s been two months,” she noted.
A briefing of the CARICOM team by members of the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) has been scheduled for 12.30 today immediately after a similar meeting with the 11 political parties that contested the elections.
During these meetings, the high-level team and other stakeholders will be briefed on the proposed methodology of the recount process, including that four districts will be tabulated simultaneously.
According to a draft order seen by this newspaper, the recount is expected to commence with Electoral Districts One, Two, Three and Four simultaneously and upon completion of Districts One, Two and Three it will be continued with Districts Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine and Ten parallel to the ongoing count of District Four.
Following the calculation of each of the 2339 ballot boxes, the tabulated results for the Regional and General Elections as well as a reconciliation report and account for the elections material herein itemized shall be recorded on a Statement of Recount.
Projected
These Statements of Recount for each district will then be tabulated at a central tabulation centre in the presence of the CARICOM high-level team and other stakeholders. This process is to be “projected on a screen to be viewed by all persons present,” with the information from each statement being simultaneously entered into a spreadsheet.
The team is then expected to be present for a tabulation of this spreadsheet and to prepare a final report parallel to that being prepared by the Chief Election Officer Keith Lowenfield.
The team’s report “may include their observations, recommendations, and conclusions which report may be considered by the Commission.”
The electoral crisis mushroomed over the count for District Four, when its Returning Officer Clairmont Mingo was accused on March 5th of presenting fictitious figures on a spreadsheet. Five major observer groups had found his tabulation not to be credible, including the CARICOM observer mission.
The Head of that mission, Cynthia Combie-Martyr had on March 6th urged that GECOM proceed with the establishment of the results for District Four in keeping with the law.
The CARICOM mission head had said in a statement that the mission accepted that the tabulation process which commenced on March 4th using the Statements of Poll and which was in accord with the law was interrupted and remained incomplete at that point.
Mingo’s tabulation was eventually declared null and void by the High Court but he then proceeded to repeat the process sparking the crisis that led to the first CARICOM bid to assist with the recount.
Qualms have been expressed in various parts of society over the recount given concerns that officials within GECOM are actively trying to rig the elections. GECOM Chair Justice (Ret’d) Claudette Singh has been severely criticised for poor management of the process.
