The Opposition People’s Progressive Party (PPP) has expressed concern at the decision of the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) Secretariat to add only one additional recount station to District 4 – Guyana’s largest voting district.
PPP’s Presidential Candidate Irfaan Ali, in giving an update on the situation on his Facebook page Thursday, said there is a “consistent approach by GECOM to dedicate the least amount of resources to Region 4.”
District 4 has the most ballot boxes left to be completed and he believes there is a deliberate attempt by GECOM to slow the recount process of this District.
The recount of ballots from the March 2, 2020 elections commenced on May 6 with three recount stations assigned to District 4 but with the completion of the recount for Districts 3 and 7, only one additional station was assigned to that District while the others were assigned to Districts 6 and 10.
Ali believes that two more recount stations should have been assigned to District 4 and he reminded how the tabulation of this District was derailed days after the general and regional elections.
“…where we had declarations from all the Regions and Region 4 was not completed and we know what took place subsequently…so we are very mindful of that scenario,” Ali noted.
Ali is perturbed that the Secretariat, headed by Chief Elections Officer, Keith Lowenfield, saw it fit to assign two recount stations to District 10 which has only 125 ballot boxes and four stations to District Six which has just over 100 boxes outstanding.
At the end of Wednesday, there were 548 ballot boxes still to be counted for District 4.
“There is no rationale to this decision. There is no justification for this decision.
“So we remain very concerned about this situation. We have raised it with the Commission and we’re awaiting a decision from the commission in reviewing this matter,” Ali said.
District 4 remains the most contentious district in these elections and was the subject of several court battles following the March 2 elections.
The PPP had noted that the recount of 85 ballot boxes from this District showed that the number of votes was altered in favour of the incumbent APNU+AFC Coalition.
According to the PPP, the tally of votes from those boxes show that the Returning Officer for Region Four, Clairmont Mingo added 4,415 votes in favour of the incumbent while removing 686 from the PPP.
The PPP has accused Mingo of inflating the numbers in half of the Statements of Poll for Region Four following the March 2 election in favour of the APNU+AFC
