TODAY, the Chief Elections Officer (CEO), Keith Lowenfield, is expected to submit his revised operational plan for the national recount to the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM).

The Elections Commission, chaired by Justice (Ret’d) Claudette Singh, had expected that the modified plan would have been tabled on Tuesday, however, the CEO sought further clarification. Nonetheless, the Commission remains hopeful that the revised plan would be available today for discussion.

“We are expecting…an amended document, hopefully a final draft, from the Secretariat, so the Commission could finalise,” Opposition nominated Commissioner Sase Gunraj told reporters shortly after exiting the meeting of the Commission on Tuesday.

Government-nominated Commissioner, Vincent Alexander, explained that, while the Commission had taken certain decisions last Friday during a more than seven-hour long meeting, those decisions were not clearly reflected in the Minutes of the meeting. As such, the CEO sought further clarification.

The issues surrounded the nature of the recount and the role of the Elections Commission. “The Minutes seemed not to have been definitive as to the nature of the recount, which is a fundamental issue,” Alexander told reporters.

Further to that, he said the Secretariat, led by Lowenfield, was uncertain of the decision taken with respect to the role of the Commission. He said the Secretariat wanted clarification on “whether the Commission will insert itself in the process or whether it will stand above the fray.”

Alexander said even as the Secretariat sought clarity on matters of importance, there were other Commissioners attempting to reignite issues that were already resolved by the Commission. That aside, he said the Commission took a decision to have a site visit conducted at the Arthur Chung Convention Centre (ACCC), where the National Recount will take place. That visit is scheduled for today, and will more than likely influence the Commission’s decision when it moves to finalise the operational plan.

In his initial draft operational plan for the recount of all the votes cast at the March 2 General and Regional Elections, the CEO had indicated that the process would take 156 days. However, the number of days is likely to be reduced based on guidance given by the commission. It, however, will not likely be reduced to 10 days as proposed by the opposition-nominated commissioners.

The CEO’s initial proposal was influenced, in part, by an indication that there should be two commissioners assigned to each workstation. However, that restriction has since been removed, paving the way for the Elections Secretariat to increase the number of workstations from three (3). But the time taken to count each ballot box will also influence his operational plan.

There is a total of 2, 339 ballot boxes, and, according to the CEO’s estimation, it will take each team approximately two (2) hours to count each of the boxes.  It was explained that each ballot would need to be projected on a screen, but before arriving at that stage, the contents of the ballot boxes would have to be examined to ascertain the number of electors on the list, the number of electors who voted, counting votes cast for both General and Regional Elections and validation of spoilt, questioned and rejected ballots. In his proposed operational plan, the workstations would operate simultaneously for a period of 10 hours daily (09:00hrs – 19:00hrs).

In light of increasing demands that the recount be done within a period of two weeks or less, Commissioner Alexander has repeatedly indicated that the recount will not be merely a numerical recount. He posited that from the inception, the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) high-level team, which had arrived mid-March to spearhead the process, had acknowledged, and it was agreed by the commission, that it would not have merely been a numerical count of the ballots.