Yesterday, the National Recount completed its seventh day by processing 48 ballot boxes taking the one-week total to 311 or 13% of the 2,339 boxes generated on polling day.
Spokesperson for the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) Yolanda Ward told reporters last evening that of that number, 12 were from Region One, Nine from Region Two, 12 from Region Three and 15 from Region Four.
The Commission is close to completing the recount At the Arthur Chung Conference Centre for Region One which has a total of 99 boxes. At the end of yesterday the completed recount of that region stood at 78 boxes. Region Four however is far from completed as only 81 of 879 boxes have been recounted. The Commission is exploring different means by which the pace of the process can be increased.
Meanwhile at the Tabulation Centre, GECOM staff has been able to tabulate 288 General Statements of Recount and 285 of the Regional SoRs.
As the Commission moves to improve the efficiency of the process by reducing the time spent on documents contained in the ballot boxes the various political parties continue to argue over the contents of the Observation Report.
Speaking on behalf of the incumbent APNU+AFC, Leonard Craig argued that every single item in the ballot box should be scrutinized since ballots have been found in envelopes that they shouldn’t be in.
He further argued that the various objections raised by his party that persons who are dead or have migrated have been recorded as voting on Election Day be retained.
He stressed that these objections will form part of the observation report. GECOM he argued cannot just wish the information away and as part of its determination of the elections results must investigate the claims made.
Observers have questioned the basis for alleging that dead or migrated people have voted. There are controls in place to prevent multiple voting and APNU+AFC agents raised no complaints on March 2nd.
“Let us test the credibility of these elections,” he repeatedly stressed even as he maintained that the elections were free, fair and credible.
According to the politician his party is using this process as a means to test how many would’ve exploited the “unclean” voters list.
Asked to provide evidence of his claims, Craig said that the information was being provided directly to the Chief Election Officer (CEO) as it was too sensitive to be released to the public.
“These are people’s private information including full name, address, departure date, flight number and destination we can’t give that to the public,” he said.
Craig however found himself in hot water when he was asked to explain how his party was able to access this sensitive information.
“We have agents in every village,” he said, adding that his party used this network to ascertain that the persons identified were not in Guyana on polling day. He could not say why this same network did not use this information to prevent these anomalies from occurring on polling day.
The People’s Progressive Party/Civic had previously argued that the coalition was abusing its incumbency to access this information. Specifically Minister of Citizenship Winston Felix has been accused of using his position as Minister of Citizenship to provide his party with migration records.
