Days after completion of District 1 recount, no report completed

Days after the recount for all the ballot boxes in District One was completed, a final report for the District has not yet been completed.

The Order which guides the recount clearly states that once all the boxes are counted and Statements of Recount (SORs) are produced, the totals from each SOR is then added up and a report for the District is compiled and signed off.

When all ten districts are completed and the reports handed in, the Chief Elections Officer will then simply have to add up the totals from those ten reports and prepare a general report, along with a summary of the observations made during the process, and hand it over to the Commission which will then declare the results.

District One had 99 ballot boxes; the final box was counted Friday. But some have argued that the tabulation of the 99 SORs from the District should await the preparation of the report of all the observations from the Region, but the Order does not provide for that.

The Order states that upon completion of all Statements of Recount for an entire electoral district, the supervisor for the tabulation shall ascertain and verify the entries therein and calculate the totals for each column therein, in the presence of the CARICOM scrutinising team, representatives of political parties that contested the elections, and international and local observers.

Once the report is completed, it will then be signed by the Supervisor and by representatives of parties which contested the elections. This process would be witnessed by the CARICOM scrutinising team, representatives of political parties that contested the elections, and international and local observers.

Parties in the tabulation centre haggled over this issue on Saturday and they were told the report would be ready when the tabulation process begins at 16:00h today.