Commission decides no opening of ballot boxes after 5PM - as 48 boxes completed for Day 4

Commission decides no opening of ballot boxes after 5PM – as 48 boxes completed for Day 4

May 10, 2020 News

With the aim of ensuring that their staffers and relevant stakeholders do not exceed the allotted 07:00PM deadline, Chairman of the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM), Justice (ret’d) Claudette Singh, decided yesterday that no ballot box should be opened after 5PM.
Opposition- nominated Commissioner Sase Gunraj raised his disapproval of the decision, arguing that cutting off the time “wastes precious man hours”.
“There are some boxes that are taking less than half of an hour to recount… That shortening of the time is having an adverse effect on the efficiency of the process. Through the number of boxes that were counted today, I believe that that number can easily be increased by at least five, seven or even 10 of the boxes.”
From the beginning of the recount process, Gunraj has always advocated for the boxes to be counted in a sequential order. That is to say from the first region with the first ballot box and then work their way down.
That advocacy, however, managed to bite back at Gunraj, after an explanation was given to him by the Commission that because of the sequential order, they will not break that process to accommodate smaller boxes, which would essentially utilize shorter time.
Meanwhile, stipulated in the legal order are the Statements of Recounts, which are produced and presented after each ballot box is counted, should be illustrated on different statements during the tabulation exercise.
Subsequent to the completion of a box, concerns and issues are recorded on an Observation Report (OR).
The order, however, does not make room for the report to be read or displayed.
Nonetheless, the A Partnership for National Unity + Alliance For Change (APNU+AFC) have heavy advocated for the OR to be displayed, and that, according to Gunraj, will only further delay the operations.
The GECOM Chair yesterday decided on allowing the Observation Reports (ORs) also be read out. Previously, it was being exhibited, but there were complaints that the contents of the ORs were not discernable.
Against this backdrop, the People’s Progressive Party/ Civic (PPP/C) posited that “this Observation Report is a collection of all the ridiculous, unsubstantiated, irrelevant issues which APNU+AFC agents are making as part of their design to undermine the electoral process, for example, they are alleging that dead and migrated persons voted without producing a scintilla of evidence to support these bizarre allegations.”
The PPP/C went on to argue that, “this is simply a line of propaganda that APNU+AFC wants to use to inundate the public domain in order to distract attention from the numbers that the process is producing.”
Furthermore, APNU+AFC- nominated Commissioner, Vincent Alexander, related to the press last evening that GECOM is considering provisions for GECOM staff to recite the OR.
At the end of Day Four of the National Recount, a total of 48 ballot boxes were counted at the Arthur Chung Conference Centre, taking the overall number of boxes counted thus far to 156.
GECOM’s Public Relations Officer, Yolanda Ward in her daily updates announced that 48 boxes were completed – 14 for Region One; 11 for Region Two; 12 for Region Three and 11 for Region Four.
With regards to tabulation, Ward said that 129 Statements of Recount (SORs) for the General Election were completed and 115 for the Regional Elections.
She went on to say that the Commission decided on a new, earlier time for the tabulation, which will now be from 04:00PM to 06:30PM.

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Commission decides no opening of ballot boxes after 5PM – as 48 boxes completed for Day 4

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