THE CARICOM observer group has presented its report on the just concluded recount of the March 2 elections that were facilitated by a Recount Order enacted by GECOM. Since its submission, the report has sparked intense debate among political parties, lawyers, and the public at large. While the PPP and its allies in and out of Guyana have lauded the report, the APNU+AFC Coalition and some independent observers and commentators have described it as flawed. In our deeply divided environment, that is not unexpected.

Having said that, there are a few aspects of the report that are worth highlighting. Firstly, the observers hinted that they were opposed to an audit and preferred a simple recount of the votes. According to the observers, “From the outset then, we recognised that the Order called for an audit rather than a mere counting of the ballots and we do believe that this was a colossal error on the part of the commission, for it facilitated delay, ensuring that the recount could not be completed within or by the stipulated period. “ That statement betrays a clear bias against the audit and gives a sense of the mindset of the observers. It further gives an insight into how they arrived at their conclusions.

Secondly, the observers found that the observations of irregularities and anomalies unearthed by the audit were not “ materially relevant to recounting of the ballots, though these objections, based on the information provided by GECOM to the party agents, signalled the possibility of a padded voters’ list which GECOM as a body must deal with expeditiously.” That statement confirms that the observers were more concerned with a simple recount than an audit which was meant to determine the credibility of the votes cast. Yet, because the irregularities were so overwhelming, they could not ignore that the voters’ list was tainted, an observation that is at the root of the problems.

A third disturbing thing about the report was the very small sample of the boxes observed by the team. It is statistically difficult to make a sweeping determination about the credibility of an election based on such a small sample. In essence, the team missed observing the overwhelming majority of the boxes that were counted. Again, this points to the fact that the observers were there to do a quick count rather that an audit.

Fourthly, despite the observers’ preference for a simple recount and the inadequacy of their sample, the report could not ignore the instances of irregularities and anomalies. Towards this end the report documented several of these “problems” which it described as “troubling,” “astonishing” “of concern,” “far more egregious,” “illustrations of failure,” “disturbing” and “pointing to some deliberate malice and/ or mischief.” It is therefore astonishing that after these descriptions of what they observed, that the team concluded that they saw no widespread evidence of fraud. The blatant inconsistency between the observation and the conclusions alerts the reader to a deeper, sinister plot by the observers.

This inconsistency is best manifested by the following paragraph in the report: “The combined absence of used counterfoils in conjunction with the absence of marked OLEs in several work stations (29 ballot boxes) which were manifest in one sub-division of Region Four, led to supervisors observing in their workstation reports that they could not validate the votes cast; some party representatives declined to sign these Observation Reports attached to the workstations. Given the work plan issued by GECOM’s secretariat, which was guided by the Gazetted Order of the recount, several thousands of ballots were not validated across more than 20 workstations. This was to prove problematic and required intervention by the commission, which issued a directive on June 05, 2020, to temporarily suspend the tabulation of those affected boxes not yet entered. On June 07, the commission ordered the tabulation of the boxes in question. The systematic absence of these statutory documents in the face of what was an audit is troubling. However, the team did not view their absence as fatal to the recount, but pointed to the need for a serious investigation by GECOM. If, as the chief elections officer constantly reminded the team, that the workers were well trained, we indeed found it odd that such a significant number of boxes were so impacted.”

Finally, the report found that the current GECOM architecture is incapable of producing proper elections. Yet it recommends that GECOM declare the current elections as “reasonably credible.” This characterisation sums up the kind of report that many should find difficult to take seriously in its entirety. Surely, those who speculated that Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves’ statements may have influenced the report seems to be on solid ground. Given the seriousness which the president and others attached to the CARICOM team, it was quite disappointing that their report fell way short of expectations.