Two days left for recount and no decision on extension

May 29, 2020 News

With merely two days left for the National Recount at the Arthur Chung Conference Center (ACCC), the Commissioners of the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM), despite meeting for hours on Thursday have made no headway on a decision for the extension of the 25-day timeline for the process.

Commissioner Vincent Alexander

The Commission was expected to make a definitive decision at their meeting yesterday but, according to Commissioner Vincent Alexander, “for all intents and purposes” GECOM is looking at June 13 as the end date for the recount exercise.”
“You never know things could change but that is where we are at,” he told reporters outside of the ACCC.
The politically nominated Commissioners, according to Alexander, are currently “stuck” on key issues emerging out of the recount process.
Alexander stated that while the order speaks to a revision of the timeline at the end of the first week, others are attempting to “prescribe new dates” into the order that were not previously provided for.
“So the order says we will have an exercise, a recount that will take 25 days and that within a week’s time, we will have a review and, like I said, it is an ongoing review but there are attempts now to specify a date of declaration and things like that,” Commissioner Alexander explained.
He pointed out that the main contention being made is for an extension date that will not provide time for the consideration of the Observation Reports (ORs). Throughout the recount process, GECOM had accumulated a heap of ORs, most emanating from the APNU+AFC Coalition. These contain allegations of foreign voters, dead voters, missing polls books and unstamped ballots.
Alexander stressed that GECOM cannot determine the credibility of the March 2, 2020 General and Regional Elections without reviewing the documents and maintained that sufficient time is needed for the examination of the ORs.
“We are going to have in addition to the 10 tabulations, which have to be brought together into one tabulation, 10 observation reports and those have got to be discussed and it takes time.
If you see what we have been coming up with in terms of volume, it will take time and what people are attempting to get us to do is to write into the order a conclusion date that will obviously interfere with a thorough and conclusive discussion of what is in the observation reports.”
The Commission is scheduled to meet again today at 10:30am.

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