TCI debunks claim that all Disciplined Services votes unstamped

The Citizenship Initiative (TCI) –one of 11 parties which contested the March 2 elections –has debunked claims that 8,000 votes belonging to the Disciplined Services (DS) were rejected due to the lack of the GECOM 6-digit stamp.

Rondha Lam, Presidential Candidate for TCI, in an interview with the News Room on Sunday said a check of the boxes where the DS votes were intermixed showed that less than a dozen were rejected for lack of stamps.

“I took Regions 1-10 minus 4 because we are still counting and…I started looking at the SORs (Statements of Recount) for those stations where we had Disciplined Services ballots intermixed and I can pretty much tell you, across those stations for the nine regions so far for the boxes that have been counted, if I found ten for lack of stamping, I have found a lot,” the Presidential Candidate explained.

A total of 8,369 ranks of the Guyana Police Force, the Guyana Prison Service and the Guyana Defence Force voted on February 21.

The APNU+AFC Coalition is claiming that almost all of those votes were not counted as they were deliberately not stamped during the intermixing process.

“To suggest that an entire group of Guyanese were disenfranchised –you know almost all of them – that was alarming to me,” Lam said.

The ballots from the officers were not stamped on the day they voted; various batches were sent to random polling stations and were then stamped and mixed with the votes of ordinary citizens on March 2.

Recently, GECOM’s Public Relations Officer Yolanda Ward told the media that she is not in possession of the figures of rejected ballots at the polling stations where the disciplined services votes were intermixed or how many of those were rejected for lack of stamps.

She also pointed out that “there is no way to identify Electors by way of ballots cast.”

So far, GECOM has completed the recount of Regions 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 8 and 9.