The Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) is today preparing to embark on another ruse spearheaded by the coalition A Partnership for National Unity/Alliance For Change (APNU/AFC) meant to extend the credible declaration of the March 2, General and Regional Elections, “so that they could continue clinging on to power.”
Attorney-at-Law Sanjeev Datadin
This, through an officially gazetted order that calls on GECOM officials to comply with the 19-point checklist provided by the Secretariat that is “simultaneously providing them with a wider array of reasons for returning to the courts.”
This is according to Attorney-at-Law Sanjeev Datadin, who on Tuesday stated that the incumbent caretaker Government is strenuously pushing for GECOM to conduct an audit of the ballots, rather than a recount, which has actually been authorised by the Commission.
Additionally, the main opposition People’s Progressive Party (PPP) on Tuesday—one day after the order was published in the gazette—expressed concerns over provisions in the recount order that would give Chief Elections Officer (CEO), Keith Lowenfield, time alone with the tabulated Statements of Recount to be used in the process.
Chief Elections Officer, Keith Lowenfield
Expanding on his concerns with the manner at which the Commission intends to proceed with the elections recount, the prominent attorney noted that any de facto audit “ignores Section 89(2) of the Representation of the People Act (RPA) that expressly states “the Returning Officer shall not open the sealed packets containing tendered ballots, the marked copies of the official list of electors …or counterfoils of used ballot papers.”
He noted, “whilst it is true that the recount is under GECOM exercising its constitutional and statutory powers [Article 162 of the Constitution] and not the RPA, the edict of RPA should not be easily ignored.”
According to the attorney, the RPA codified the restriction because “it was recognised that to do otherwise in a recount would be chaotic and take far too long.”
He noted that in its editorial of May 5, the State-run Chronicle boasted about the supposed recount that GECOM had authorised, which noted: “there will be a full, comprehensive recount, and a thorough forensic audit.”
Datadin argued, however, that there is a more fundamental point that the caretaker Government ignored.
According to Datadin, “to engage in anything except a recount of the ballots allows [Vincent] Alexander and his APNU cohorts to raise all manner of issues relating to the Official List of Electors (OLE) and voters with no dispute resolution protocol in place – the recount process would be rendered paralysed.”
It was noted too that another issue of concern regards the propriety of any organisation auditing itself.
According to Datadin “while internal audits are standard for most organisations, these exercises are “usually used for internal purposes and assess such issues, such as control, governance and risk management processes within an organisation.”
He suggested that there is in fact, a need for an internal audit to discover what actually occurred with the tabulation of the Statements of Poll by Region Four Returning Officer, Clairmont Mingo.
He was adamant that “if the GECOM Commission felt it was necessary to have an audit of the ballots for the credibility of the March 2 elections, it should have counted the ballots, declared the results – as was requested by the Peoples National Congress after the 1997 elections.”
At the time, an external auditor would have to be retained as was “Ulric Cross in that instance,” according to Datadin.
