MOMENTS after the Guyana Elections Commission indicated that the tabulation process for each electoral district will commence upon the completion of all of the Statements of Recount (SORs) in accordance with the order, it reverted on its position, thereby allowing for the tabulation to take place on a daily basis as they are submitted to the tabulation centre from the 10 workstations.
A Statement of Recount (SOR) is generated upon the completion of each ballot box, and details the result of the General and Regional Recount, according to the votes cast in an electoral block.
GECOM’s Public Relations Officer, Yolanda Ward, said that, based on a decision of the Elections Commission on Thursday, the tabulation process will commence daily at 17:00hrs until 18:30hrs. According to her, the decision was taken to tabulate the SORs daily based on recommendations made by a political party. “I don’t know what prompted the Commission to move in that direction of a decision in that regard but I am sure that the Commission in its wisdom has enough justification as to its actions,” Ward told reporters.
But the decision, she said, will not affect the order or result in an amendment. “The order will not be amended since at the end of every region, they will also go back through everything full process,” Ward told reporters moments after the Elections Commission meeting ended.
This means that as the Statements of Recount are produced at the level of the workstations, they will be submitted to the tabulation centre where they will be tabulated on a daily basis from 17:00hrs. Then, once all the SORs are completed for a given region, GECOM, in the presence of party agents and observers, will then proceed to tabulate those SORs for a second time.
According to the Order gazetted on Monday, the SORs will be tabulated at central tabulation centre upon the completion of the count at the workstations.
“The Statement of Recount shall be projected on a screen to be viewed by all persons present and the information shall be input into a matrix, which process could be viewed, simultaneously, by all persons present,” a section of the Order states. Those persons include the CARICOM scrutinizing team, representatives of political parties that contested the March 2 Elections, international and local observers and GECOM officials.
Less than an hour before Ward made the announcement based on the Commission’s decision, she had indicated that the tabulation of Statements of Recount for any given Region would commence on the completion of all of the SORs.
“Basically what the order dictates is that the tabulation exercise will be done at the end of every region, and that is what the order states,” Ward had explained. She was keen on noting that the SORs would be projected as they are being tabulated, in addition to an excel file showing the data being inputted from the SORs.
But ANUG representative, Timothy Jonas, objected to the SORs being tabulated collectively for a given region. According to him, the order allows for the SORs to be tabulated within the Central Tabulation Centre as they are completed at the level of the workstations. “It is my view that that Statement of Recount needs to be tabulated on an ongoing basis, publicly for everyone to see,” Jonas posited while emphasizing that it would lend to a transparent process. He contended that to tabulate all of the SORs at once would affect the credibility of the process.
But Ward was quick to debunk that, explaining that each step of the way representatives of the various political parties and observers are provided with copies of the SORs and the Observation Reports, and the process at that stage cannot be compromised.
Ward reminded that once a Statement of Recount is generated, it is signed by the GECOM staff present and the representatives from the various political parties present and copies are distributed to them.
But as the day progressed more issues arose with the tabulation process. Ward had indicated that while six SORs from Region One were tabulated on Wednesday, that was merely a demonstration of the tabulation exercise and not the actual tabulation, as she alluded to the order.
She noted that the demonstration was done after a party agent approached the Chair of GECOM, Justice (Ret’d) Claudette Singh, asking for same to be facilitated. But People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C) Executive, Dr Frank Anthony, and Leader of Liberty and Justice Party (JLP), Lenox Shuman, were adamant that what took place at the Tabulation Center was the actual tabulation and not a dry run of the exercise.
“We went through a tabulation process for those six both for the General and Regional,” Dr. Anthony said. According to Dr. Anthony, it was expected that, having completed six Statements of Recount (SORs) from Region One, they would have proceeded, on Thursday, to tabulate SORs submitted from other regions. However, he said representatives from the various political parties were informed that the tabulation would be done from 17:00hrs to 18:30hrs daily.
Dr. Anthony had also complained to the press that GECOM, on Thursday, opted to have the Secretariat insert comments on the Statements of Recount but the Public Relations Officer said that such was far from the truth. Ward said what was agreed by the Elections Commission was for the Observation Report to be made public during the tabulation exercise.
“For every workstation, an observation report is generated and it was also a decision of the Elections Commission that, that observation report be presented during the tabulation process,” the GECOM PRO clarified. She made it clear that it was never GECOM’s intention to have the observations or comments inserted on the SORs as alleged by the PPP/C. “The decision of the Commission is not for observation information to be written onto the Statements of Recount. The decision of the Commission is that the observation report that is generated at the respective work stations which is attached to that Statement of Recount, be shown or the information be read to those in the tabulation centre,” Ward explained.
Source: https://issuu.com/guyanachroniclee-paper/docs/guyana_chronicle_epaper_05_08_2020