U.S. Secretary of State urges credible, transparent vote recount

The U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in a statement on Guyana Tuesday morning said the U.S. government looks forward to working with the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) and the international observer community on the recount of votes cast on March 02, 2020.

He said that this is to ensure that the vote recount process is “free, fair, transparent and credible.”

The Court of Appeal has not yet handed down its orders after Sunday saying that GECOM cannot hand over supervision of the process to CARICOM, or any other team for that matter since the electoral laws spell out that GECOM is the one to manage the process.

GECOM is still interested in using CARICOM and would have to figure out what language it would use to facilitate that involvement.

The electoral process was thrown into disarray after parties and local and international observers deemed the District Four declaration fraudulent. The High Court later confirmed that the Returning Officer had breached the country’s electoral laws by not tabulating the statements of poll in the presence of party agents and others entitled to observe the process.

The Returning Officer then committed to abide by the ruling but the second declaration he made was also dismissed as being fraudulent.

That questionable count would see President David Granger’s APNU+AFC remaining in office; but the PPP says it has won the elections and once a credible recount is done that position would be validated.

GECOM has essentially dismissed all of the declarations for the ten electoral districts and said it would do a recount in numerical order.

The Commission is expected to discuss a plan for the recount as prepared by the Chief Elections Officer.

No decision has yet been made on when the recount would start.