…party calls on GECOM to establish clear guidelines

ADDING to the mountain of discrepancies reportedly unearthed since the start of the National Recount, the A Partnership for National Unity + Alliance for Change (APNU+AFC) said Friday there is a worrying trend which shows that a number of ballots polled in its favour were not stamped by Presiding Officers (POs) on E-Day with the official six-digit stamp.

It said the situation is being further compounded by those unstamped ballots being deemed rejected, in the case of the APNU+AFC, a situation it says the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) must make every effort to address.

Speaking to reporters outside the confines of the Arthur Chung Conference Centre, the site of the National Recount, APNU+AFC Executive Member Aubrey Norton painted a vivid picture of the dilemma with which the ‘Coalition’ is now faced.

“In District 4, Ballot Box 4174, there are 12 rejected ballots because the PO didn’t stamp them; and all of them are for the APNU+AFC,” Norton said. “We have seen in other areas, there is one with another 11 [unstamped ballots], one with six,” he went on to explain, while adding that in some instances, the ballots cast by members of the Joint Services were not stamped as well.

A DISTURBING TREND
This trend, he said, is disturbing. “So what, in essence, has emerged is a pattern in which there seems to be a deliberate effort not to stamp, particularly in APNU+AFC strongholds, these ballots, causing them to be rejected. Now you might think that 12 ballots are little but 12 ballots in 20 ballot boxes, you can do the mathematics,” Norton told reporters.
The APNU+AFC executive said that based on the workplan issued by the Elections Commission, those unstamped ballots ought to be deemed valid.

“The truth of the manner is, there are some contradictions, in the work Order that GECOM put out,” Norton said. “It says once the intention is clear that the vote for going to that political party, then it should be recorded. Now, you have to juxtapose that with a law that says it should have the six digits,” he reasoned, while making it clear that the ‘Coalition’ will protest any decision not to grant the APNU+AFC the votes.

That issue aside, Norton said on Friday that a ballot box (No. 5006) from Region Five (Mahaica-Berbice) was discovered with no marked List of Electors, or any other documents, except for 209 ballots in favour of the People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C), and six (6) in favour of the APNU+AFC.

This, he said, forms part of the trend of irregularities and discrepancies that have surfaced since the start of the recount. “You are aware that we now started Region Five (Mahaica-Berbice),” he said, “and we always felt that the real story will begin to come out in Regions Five and Six (East Berbice-Corentyne). We are aware, for instance, that in two villages in West Coast Berbice, we will bring to the attention of this recount process that nearly half of the village had migrated, but the people voted.”

RESIDENCY NOT A REQUIREMENT
While acknowledging that residency is not a requirement for Guyanese to participate in the electoral process, the APNU+AFC executive argued that the records show that the individuals who are alleged to have voted were never in Guyana at the time of Elections.
“We are not saying because you are a migrant, you can’t vote, but the record shows that you have migrated; when we checked, you have migrated, but for some reason, you were able to vote while you were out of the jurisdiction, and that’s of grave concern,” he explained.

Turning his attention to the ongoing verbal battle on the legitimacy of the Statements of Poll (SOPs) in the possession of the PPP/C, when checked against the official SOPs in GECOM’s possession, Norton said that the tabulations of SOPs in Region One (Barima-Waini) ended on Friday with APNU+AFC receiving votes that were initially given to the PPP/C by POs in that District.

“In the Region One case, virtually all the cases that we have got back are votes that were placed in PPP/C envelopes as PPP,” he said, adding: “And what the recount process has done is to bring to the fore that there were a lot of APNU+AFC ballots that were placed in PPP envelopes.”

He said the party had long argued that a number of the POs had been compromised, while pointing out that some were seen campaigning for the PPP/C in the lead-up to the March 2 General and Regional Elections. Norton further pointed out that on E-Day, there were many instances where persons voted twice, and on behalf of the dead, and these, he said, when detected, were brought to the attention of GECOM.