Legal travesty on SOPs

What has, since the NCM of Dec 21, 2018, exploded to exponential proportions after the elections of March 2, 2020 demonstrates most pellucidly how the law, which was put in place as a shield to protect citizens, can be turned into a sword to frustrate their will and even oppress them. All it takes are men who refuse to acknowledge that there is the law, and then there is the spirit of the law. And it is the spirit of the law that fills any ambiguities in the law, so that those who look at the greater good rather than their own narrow and selfish aims can do “the right thing”, and not the expedient thing.
And how do we discern this “spirit of the law”? It really is not difficult at all: we simply have to answer the question, “When the legislators were framing the law, what were they seeking to do?” In law, that is called the “intent”. And from this perspective, we can ask: “What did the framers of the constitution mean when they inserted in our constitution the clause on no confidence motions (NCM)?” It simply stated that if the motion was carried on a majority vote, “the president and cabinet shall resign and elections held within three months to form a new government”.
The intent of the framers was to operationalise the notion that since governments are formed through the will of the people expressed through a majority of their elected representatives, if a sitting government loses that majority, then it has “fallen”.
In Britain and in other members of the Commonwealth that adopted the NCM clause, governments have regularly fallen, and elections have been held through its operation. But not in Guyana. Here, the PNC-led APNU/AFC coalition insisted that the word “majority” could be parsed to mean that 33 was not greater than 32 to deliver the requisite majority in a 65-member house. The irony that they were in office through the same majority surely did not escape them, but that did not make a difference; they would us the contrived “technicality” even in a circumstance that the CCJ would, in the end, pronounce as needing “no gloss”.
And this is the identical attitude to the law being expressed by the PNC-led APNU/AFC coalition on the tabulation of the SOPs for Reg 4. The laws governing the electoral process as encompassed in the present “Representation of the Peoples Act” were explicitly amended to address the loopholes through which the PNC had rigged elections between 1966 and 1985. The counting of the ballots at the place of poll was resisted for the longest while by Desmond Hoyte, and only consented to in time for the 1992 elections.
The encapsulation of that count, as summarised by a “Statement of Poll” for each box into which ballots had been inserted, and the signatures on the statement, made by each of the polling agents of the political parties present as well as the Presiding Officer, was designed to address concerns that “every vote was transparently counted”. So also was the posting of a copy of the SOP in front of the Polling Station, and a copy given to each party representative and also to the Returning Officer (RO) for each region. This RO would tabulate the SOPs in full view of the party representatives (Counting Officers) and other stakeholders as a double check. The intent was to ensure transparency comparable to that at the counting of the individual votes.
This process was adhered to at every election since 1992 without any major problem. But, in 2020, we have now witnessed a tabulation by the Reg 4 RO in which, after more than half of the SOPs were tabulated, a series of contrived excuses were floated to deny that transparency by exhibiting the RO’s SOPs. We have now been returned to the courts by the PNC-led APNU/AFC coalition, which have refused to resolve the matter by simply producing the RO’s original SOPs, or the CEO’s.
And the Court has now ruled that those SOPs cannot be produced. Was not the intent of the law to facilitate transparency?