…returning officers to be pulled in
DAY 13 of the national recount revealed that two ballot boxes coming out from two separate polling places at the Diamond Nursery School, have their Official List of Electors (OLE) mixed up, and the numbers on the voters’ list do not correspond with the number of ballots in the boxes.
Sharing this discovery with the media on Monday morning was Varun Mahadeo, who is an A Partnership for National Unity + Alliance For Change (APNU+AFC) counting agent that was attached at the recount station with one of the flawed boxes.
Mahadeo said that when the first box came in to their station and was being examined, “we noticed that there was an incorrect OLE in that box. When we correspond the amount of ballot issued for that specific division, the list had 366 voters, and the ballots issued was 319. Right away we were able to determine there was an issue. Because there was less amount of ballots issued to the amount of electors on the list… when the staff of GECOM came through to investigate exactly what happened, they actually noticed that the list was in a totally different box.”
He was in station 8 and the correct list was in a box at station 10. This, he said only leaves one conclusion. “If you have a list of electors that is totally different from the polling station they are supposed to be at, then everyone who went to that specific box, that specific division, would have not been able to cast a ballot, since the list is totally wrong,” Mahadeo said.
Confirming this, GECOM’s Commissioner, Vincent Alexander said that both boxes are from the same building, but how the lists are mixed up is very strange.
“We found this to be very strange, and we’ve also found instances where the correct OLE is in the box, but for some strange reason, strange, extraneous OLEs are also in the box… I would say at the end of the day, some human action would have caused that to occur. Whether it is a human error, I would not make a judgement. But it was a human action,” Alexander told the media.
He said that what has happened for the time being, “those boxes have been returned onto the containers and were not counted as the secretariat seeks to make a determination on what could have caused such.”
GECOM’s Public Relations Officer, Yolanda Ward, said that this will also require the Returning Officers of those stations to be called in for investigation.
“We don’t know what could have happened, but the decision is to request the two ROs and have an investigation on what may have caused such to happen. We have to try to ascertain how this could happen… There is nothing in law that the commission itself, based on the findings of their investigations, can do in this process… But we have to do our investigations and these persons may not be able to be employed again with GECOM after the investigation concludes,” Ward said.
Source: https://issuu.com/guyanachroniclee-paper/docs/guyana_chronicle_epaper_05_19_2020