…leaders of small parties question authenticity
…admit unable to field agents at all polling stations
AMID the row over Statements of Poll following last week’s general and regional elections, accusations are being levelled against the main opposition- PPP for distributing dubious SOPs and at least one small party has admitted to receiving their copies from the Bharrat Jagdeo-led outfit.
Presidential Candidate of the People’s Republican Party (PRP), Phyllis Jordan, has come out to state that the Statements of Poll (SOPs) presented “very kindly” to her party by a larger political party does not match the SOPs collected by her own party agents. Jordan’s disclosure was made on Monday evening in a live video on her Facebook page and comes at a time when the People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C) has been vehemently arguing that the votes from its own SOPs collected do not match the official votes from the SOPs of the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM). The main Opposition party therefore concluded that there was some form of “rigging” involved at the Commission — the official body for the collection and pronouncement on SOPs. Currently a case against GECOM brought by the Opposition is before Chief Justice, Roxane George-Wiltshire, at the High Court and will determine whether there must be a re-verification of the votes of Region Four which is currently under contest.
Several small parties have also teamed up with the opposition requesting that GECOM conducts a re-verification of the votes. At the sidelines of the court matter on Sunday, the media had asked A New and United Guyana (ANUG) Executive, Timothy Jonas, how his party had received its total count of SOPs of the Region but he refused to answer. It is generally known that small parties do not have the manpower to collect SOPs from the 879 polling stations in Region Four much less the over 2,000 polling stations countrywide. A few days ago, Presidential Candidate of The Citizenship Initiative (TCI), Rondha-Ann Lam, told the media that her party was only able to secure a little over 200 SOPs for Region Four.
Nonetheless, small party representatives, like Jonas, have been crying foul play on GECOM’s part stating that the SOPs in their [ANUG’s] possession show discrepancies. Bringing a new dimension to the anomaly, Jordan admitted that her party had been presented with “the SOPs” it was incapable of retrieving itself. “We would not have gotten the Statements of Poll for every polling station. To be honest, the People’s Republic Party has only a handful of Statements of Poll. The people who will have Statements of Poll for all the polling stations would be the large parties which would be the coalition and PPP/C because they would have been able to send scrutineers to all the polling stations,” she explained.
“The small parties only have a smattering of SOPs. Now, having said that, let me let you know that we small parties were given handouts with collated versions of the SOPs. We were very kindly given because when we said we didn’t have because we didn’t have scrutineers at all the stations, I can tell you that one of the big parties very kindly offered us copies of a handout that had collated the results from the SOPs.”
The PRP head said that it was only until later, when she and others were comparing the SOPs her party gathered and the SOPs given to them by the larger party that she noticed blatant discrepancies. She said: “Now, let me tell you, in the spirit of transparency, that as the Presidential candidate for the PRP, I had a look at those results. It wasn’t an in-depth look because our elections agent has that collated copy that we got from one of the big parties in her possession but I can tell you this much. When I had a look at it, I was surprised because I saw results on it that did not bear out the results that I had from the smattering of SOPs that we collected at the polling stations where we had scrutineers.” Jordan has not yet named the specific main party in question but has stated that she will make this known in due time. Efforts to contact her by this media house on Tuesday were futile.
Meanwhile, speaking to the verification process at GECOM’s centre, TCI’s Lam had stated online: “…parts of Georgetown had been completed and the Sophia SOPs in question. I asked for images to be sent for me from folks in that area. The ones being read out and what the Opposition was claiming were miles apart. They reflected an unusually high voting pattern for the Opposition to benefit.”
She told the newspaper on Tuesday that the TCI has created a website to which persons can post photos of SOPs collected countrywide and the party is then conducting a verification process by visiting these polling stations to see a reflection of the same. TCI will also begin cross checking SOPs issued by the PPP/C. She stated: “Now we’re entering data as is and the next thing after is that we’re going to do a cross reference of the ones that the PPP posted on their page and of the ones we found.”
She stated that TCI will stand by the court’s decision and GECOM’s final pronouncement despite whichever party wins but it wants to ensure that it adds its voice to the matter by doing its own investigation. The PPP/C is the only party to have accused GECOM — the body empowered by law to declare the elections results — of “working to create fake statements of polls”. On the other hand, the Opposition maintains that its own tabulations done in-house are correct and the commission’s false.
