Opposition-nominated commissioners on the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) will not be supporting Chief Election Officer (CEO) Gocool Boodoo’s bid to extend his contract beyond its April 30 expiry date as a result of an incorrect calculation that could have resulted in the PPP/C being declared the outright winner of the November 28, 2011 polls.
“His contract is up… he is gone at the end of the contract. It is still to be determined if to offer him a new contract,” a source close to the commission explained, while adding that there will be an assessment done to determine whether a new contract is warranted.
Asked whether the opposition-nominated members of the commission would be inclined to support Boodoo’s bid for a contract renewal, the source said, “If you know what he did during the last elections, the opposition would be crazy to support [him].”
“We are going through a process…we will have an assessment instrument… we don’t want to make a statement pending the outcome of that assessment,” the source added, while noting that the aim of the commission is to quickly attend to the assessment so that it will be over prior to the end of Boodoo’s contract.
Asked for a comment last week, Gecom Public Relations Officer Vishnu Persaud confirmed that there has been a meeting where Boodoo’s contract extension was discussed. He also said that there will be an assessment prior to any decisions being taken.
Following the declaration of election results on December 1, 2011, one of the opposition-nominated commissioners confirmed that Boodoo wanted to declare the PPP/C winners of the elections by a majority. He had miscalculated the allocation of seats in the National Assembly.
The commissioner also disclosed that it was an opposition-nominated commissioner who raised an objection, while noting that “it was obvious” something was not right with the results.
Faced with the accusation, a source said that the calculation of seat allocation, which was presented based on the number of votes garnered by the parties, was found to be erroneous. That person said that the error was observed upon checks of the CEO’s submission being perused by commissioners, to which the calculations were submitted for ratification,
The person said that the error was shared with the CEO and every member of the Commission and subsequently accepted unanimously as an error. The seat allocation was then adjusted accordingly and the commissioners gave the CEO approval to make the final declaration.
The PPP/C was eventually declared the winner of the presidency, but with only 32 seats to APNU’s 26 and AFC’s 7, it lost control of the National Assembly.
Gecom Chairman Dr Steve Surujbally later said he has accepted that the incorrect declaration was nothing but a human error until he saw proof to the contrary. “What is of such great import is that the system worked… the system worked,” Surujbally told Stabroek News. “The moment it was given, the commissioners realised something was wrong and one commissioner, who is an author of the methodology, raised his hand and said could we go through this step by step, and of course I acquiesced immediately and we went through it and realised that the calculation was wrong,” he said.
