Georgetown: All claims and objections being made by political parties during the national recount at the Arthur Chung Convention Center will be entertained by the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) but can only be addressed with an elections petition, according to Former Speaker of the National Assembly Ralph Ramkarran.
The recount process has so far shown that there was clear electoral fraud in District Four, with the numbers systematically bumped up in order to give APNU+AFC a victory.
The legal luminary on Sunday said GECOM is not designed as an evidentiary institution or as a trial body and therefore cannot collect evidence or investigate claims that persons who are dead or have migrated were marked as having voted in the March 2 elections.
He explained that the elections body can only acknowledge that such claims were made.
“It is not possible for GECOM to order a recount under the Election Laws Amendment Act and at the end of the process to abandon a declaration of that recount and then return to the count and issue a declaration based on the report which has been made to GECOM by the Chief Elections Officer in relation to his invitation to make a declaration,” he explained.
Further, Ramkarran explained that a declaration by the Commission was now mandatory because Parliament has been already dissolved and cannot be recalled.
He said GECOM is fully empowered to conduct the recount under Article 163 of Guyana’s Constitution and Section 22 of the Election Law Amendment Act as well as the Representation of the People Act.
“There is no question about the legality of a recount,” he said.
Executive Member of the People’s Progressive Party (PPP), Attorney-at-Law Anil Nandlall was Sunday expected to dispatch a letter to the GECOM Chairman, expressing concern about her invitation to APNU/AFC to submit evidence mainly about the deceased and emigrants.
He said GECOM is responsible for holding free and fair based on the procedures in the Representation of the People Act.
He said GECOM should not have invited objections to ballots cast at the more than 2,339 polling stations.
“They should not have accepted these objections from the beginning. They should shave said record your objections and take them to the election petition court,” he said.
After touring the Arthur Chung Conference Center where the national vote recount is taking place, he said congratulated the staff of GECOM, political party agents and observers for carrying out the “painstaking” process in a meticulous manner.
Ramkarran who is also presidential candidate of (A New and United Guyana ANUG), said that all the objections are serving to do at this time is to slow down the recount process, which he described as tedious.
The incumbent APNU+AFC was defeated in a No Confidence motion one and a half year ago, but has held on to power through a series of legal challenges until the caretaker President called elections.
APNU+AFC has not presented any evidence to back up its various claims but said it will present such evidence to GECOM.
APNU+AFC has claimed it won the elections but has refused to present the copies of the Statements of Poll it has in its possession to show how it won the elections.
However, all opposition parties have acknowledged that their copies of the statements of polls countrywide when tallied up indicated that the PPP won the March, 2 2020 elections.
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