At the end of day five of the national recount of votes from the March 2nd General and Regional Elections, 207 of 2,339 ballot boxes had been recounted. If an extrapolation is made of that daily average it would mean that the entire process will take around 60 days and not the 25 days originally envisaged by the Order made by the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) under the Constitution and the Election Laws (Amendment) Act.
Part 2 of the Order says the inscribed period of 25 days will be “subject to a review by the Commission during the course of the first week of the recount”. It is clear that that time is already upon GECOM. It should convene a meeting urgently to decide how to drastically speed up the process.
The citizens of this country have been waiting now for 70 days for an election result. Scandalous and unheard of. The person to be held ultimately responsible for this fiasco is the Chair of GECOM, Justice of Appeal (Ret’d) Claudette Singh. From the inception, she has made ill-judged decisions on the elections process including the merging of data from house-to-house registration with the National Register of Registrants and allowing the elections timetable to meander until the end of February, 2020. Her decisions have dovetailed with the agenda of APNU+AFC to stall elections and to ultimately defy the will of the people. Her management of the post-March 2nd period has accentuated the troubling questions about her commitment to a free and fair elections result particularly since she failed twice to stop two fictitious declarations by District Four Returning Officer, Clairmont Mingo which brought the country to the brink of an illegal swearing in of the incumbent.
What Ms Singh must understand is that this is no ordinary election recount. There is sufficient evidence from party agents and local and international observers to establish that senior people within GECOM have been engaged in a malevolent attempt to fix the election result in a variety of ways. And they have not given up. A prolonged recount provides a multiplicity of avenues for the schemers to continue with their plotting whether it is the perverse enlisting of the COVID-19 protocols or the outlandish claims about what transpired at polling stations during the counting of ballots on the night of March 2nd.
The majority of the ill-founded claims about the recounted ballot boxes have come from the agents of the incumbent APNU+AFC. It has claimed to have won the elections yet its agents at the 10 work stations at the recount centre seem be doing their damnedest to string out the process and to baselessly undermine the integrity of the elections. There is no logic in their behaviour.
Announcing that APNU+AFC had branded the recount process `Operation Eagle Eye’, its election agent Joseph Harmon told reporters on Saturday “There are questions with respect to whether people who are dead voted and people who are not around voted as well… Is this a true reflection of the will of the Guyanese people…this recount will decide that matter”.
The eagle-eyed operatives may now have to conduct séances with the dearly departed to determine whether they had indeed trundled into polling stations in some unearthly manifestation to cast ballots without their ghostly presence being detected by the supposedly vigilant agents of APNU+AFC.
On the night of March 2nd, 2,339 teams of ordinary Guyanese drawn from GECOM staff and party agents across the political spectrum and in some cases under the watchful eyes of observers counted the votes for both the regional and general elections, resolved disputes over ballots and industriously discharged their duties by posting up Statements of Poll outside of their ballot stations. They have been mightily let down by the fraudulent conduct of senior members of the GECOM staff and by the effete and questionable mindset of the GECOM Chair.
Aside from creating inordinate delays in the process, the APNU+AFC agents are yet to present any convincing information on irregularities in the ballot boxes that have so far been recounted. Their efforts veer more in the direction of inhibiting the recount and the certification of a final result.
GECOM should meet immediately to adjust the parameters of the recount to ensure a rapid conclusion of the process and a declaration.
First, GECOM should move to expunge from the preamble to the Order aspects which pertain to auditing of the elections such as the number of votes cast without ID cards and the amorphous “statistical anomalies”. Those are matters for an election petition. What was clearly agreed to be done was a simple recount of all of the votes and that and only that must be done. The livestreaming of observation reports from the 10 work stations is just further time wasting and should be omitted.
Second, GECOM must expand the hours of counting and/or increase the number of work stations. Given what has transpired over the last five days, 11 hours is not enough and GECOM may have to consider moving to 18 hours per day with two shifts and finding room within the Arthur Chung Conference Centre for at least two more work stations. This would of necessity require more staff and observers and would be the opportune moment to clear the way for the return of Carter Center observers.
The people of this country have endured enough since March 2nd in trying to make certain that Guyana remains an electoral democracy. Ms Singh must match their efforts by ensuring that this recount is brought swiftly to a fair conclusion so that the election result can be finally certified.
