To describe the pace of the recount as slothful would be the understatement of the year. There we were on the first day of the process when 25 boxes out of a total of 2339 were recounted. Of course the exercise started two hours and fifteen minutes late and everyone involved had to familiarise themselves with the procedures, so inevitably the number completed was disappointing. Nevertheless, since ‘hope springs eternal in the human breast’, it was anticipated that the momentum would increase on Day 2. It was not to be.
On Thursday, a grand tally of 40 ballot boxes was dealt with, which added to the 25 of the previous day represented an insignificant 3% of the total. We quoted Mr Timothy Jonas of ANUG as commenting, “I am concerned about the 25-day original plan because if you have 2,200 ballot boxes, even if we get 20 or 30 done a day that’s still a 100 or 75 days not 25 days, so we have a mathematical problem.”
Gecom PRO Yolanda Ward told the media that there was no average time for the counting of a box, as this was contingent on the number of ballots it contained as well as the number of queries raised in relation to its contents. We reported her as giving the example of a District One box which contained ballots from 47 voters but which took nearly two hours to count. Mr Jonas for his part cited the case of his workstation where a District Four box of more than 200 votes took all morning.
By Day 3 the snail-like tempo had become established with 43 boxes being counted in all, 10 of them from Regions One and Two, 11 from Region Three and 12 from Region Four. That brought the overall total to 108 out of 2339 boxes representing just 5% of the complement.
As such, Mr Jonas’s comment in relation to the 25-day estimate following Day One remains all too relevant.
After the first day Mr Jonas and APNU+AFC agent Ganesh Mahipaul were in accord that it was the process which was slow, not that anyone was delaying. The process, however, involves two components: one is the actual counting of the votes cast, and the other is the reconciliation exercise, which involves ensuring that the ballots which had been issued to the polling stations correspond to the counterfoils as well as the ballots cast, destroyed, spoiled and stamped.
It is in the course of reconciliation that queries arise, and by the third day there had been a slew of queries, the majority of which derived from APNU+AFC and were retarding the pace of the recount. Among other things agents from this party claimed that some persons who were recorded as having voted were in fact dead, while others had migrated or were not in the country on March 2.
Mr Mahipaul, for example, who had complained of several discrepancies at his station, made mention of the first box they opened on Day 3 which had 11 oaths of identity that had not been signed. In his view this was a major issue because it could not be established whether these individuals had actually been present to cast their votes. When asked if his party agent at the polling station on March 2 had raised an objection, he was unable to say.
Government-appointed Commissioner Vincent Alexander said that since the objective was to produce a “final credible count” some requests had to be dealt with since they affected “credibility”. One example he cited was where the number of ballots was greater than the number crossed off on the voters’ list, although both Ms Ward and Mr Ali pointed out that in some places people voted via letters of employment, while disciplined services ballots were also included in the total count. In these instances, they said, the names crossed out on the List of Electors would not equal the number of ballots which had been cast.
Not unexpectedly, the opposition had a different perspective on events. PPP/C member Mr Anil Nandlall, who emphasised that the pace needed to be accelerated, was quoted as saying, “[T]he recount is a recount of those votes cast by the electorate, but we find that a tremendous amount of time is being expended on matters not connected to the recount itself but concerning the examination of other materials in the box [such as] reconciling lists of electors.” He estimated that 90% of the time devoted to each box was spent on issues not related to the recount, and that the counting of actual ballots in a box with approximately 100 electors would take a mere 30 minutes.
Like PPP/C General Secretary Bharrat Jagdeo and presidential candidate Mr Irfaan Ali, Mr Nandlall was of the view that since we were dealing with “a recount of the ballots that were cast and counted by the presiding officer on elections night,” how they got there and whether they were rightly placed there was a matter for an elections petition. He also said that wild and reckless allegations were being made without any evidence being proffered.
For his part Mr Ali said the APNU+AFC was still raising the same types of queries which had been dealt with on Day One. Together with Mr Nandlall he has requested that Gecom put together a list of the queries which have been asked and already answered, so that the same issues are not brought up again by different party agents and staff members because of rotation arrangements.
Opposition-appointed Commissioner Sase Gunraj too was reported as saying that not only were many of the issues raised irrelevant to the process, but they simply could not be settled during the recount. With reference to accusations about voters who had died or migrated he said that these could be properly investigated in a Claims and Objections period or on polling day, but that the recount did not possess the resources necessary. “In the polling station you have party agents, you have Gecom officials, you have observers. They get the opportunity to see who walks in the door, they get the opportunity to compare that person’s face to a folio, and they get the opportunity to look at an identity document. They don’t have that facility here because this is a secondary layer [and] we really don’t have the authority to question that at this stage,” he said.
When Ms Ward was asked whether the queries were slowing up the process, she denied it. “We are at a recount exercise and people will have queries. It is important that those queries are adequately addressed given the emphasis on transparency and credibility of the process.
We want to ensure every agent is satisfied,” she said. That of course does not address the question of whether the volume of queries is delaying the process.
Mr Alexander explained that the commission had committed to holding in “abeyance” the Statements of Recount from boxes with significant issues until those matters were settled. If the queries start to mount up, however, one can only wonder just how many that might in due course involve and whether potentially it might even prove an impediment to the completion of the recount.
The reconciliation provision in the Order for the recount allows room for queries. With the best will in the world, there will inevitably be a small number of discrepancies; that is the electoral norm all over the world in the best-run democracies. However, these are not of an order which will affect the outcome of an election. The same is the case here. But if it transpires that the coalition has it in mind to tell us that the discrepancies are of some gargantuan, or at least, substantial order which could throw into question the credibility of the election, then one would have to ask what exactly their 2,339 polling agents were doing on March 2, when they raised no objections to these, and signed off on all the SoPs. Was it a case of mass narcolepsy?
The de facto government has to understand that a large volume of queries will inevitably cast doubt on their good faith where the recount is concerned. One of their candidates already derailed the first recount, so there is not a great deal of public trust in their commitment to the second.
That said, it is up to Gecom to address the question of the pace of the recount. Commendably, it agreed to authorize the continuous tabulation of Statements of Recount between 5 and 6.30 pm every day, instead of tabulating these after every box in a given electoral district had been counted, so perhaps now it could take on board the proposal of Messrs Nandlall and Ali. As mentioned above, they have requested that the commission compile a list of queries that have already been answered, so they are not recycled by party agents coming on to a later shift. Perhaps too, Gecom could look at the matter of frivolous queries, where no evidence is adduced for the allegations being made. One suspects that if the process is to be expedited in any significant way, the matter of the plethora of queries will have to be addressed.
