Recount Day Four: 22 ballot boxes completed at noon today

DPI, Guyana, Saturday, May 9, 2020

As the national recounting process of the March 2, 2020, General and Regional Elections continues, 22 boxes were completed thus far for today; seven for Region One, and five for each of Regions Two, Three and Four.

This was disclosed by the Public Relations Officer (PRO) of GECOM, Yolanda Ward during a media briefing at around 02:29 hours at the Arthur Chung Conference Centre (ACCC), Liliendaal.

“They are currently working on some other boxes and those will be completed shortly,” Ward said.

She noted that while there were no major issues arising today there were several queries resolved; e.g. questions were raised concerning the validity of a ballot.

Ward also referred to the issue of a ballot with the signature of the elector at the back. It was noted that the ballot should have been rejected at the polling station because it was unacceptable since the elector could be identified.

“Matters like those are some of the issues that came up at the stations but we were able to quickly resolve them …there wasn’t anything that caused a long delay in the respective stations,” Ward stated.

As to the issue of missing poll books, Ward said that GECOM is now in receipt of all the poll books which are now being integrated into the recounting process.

These issues are also being recorded in the observation reports as part of the process of examining the transparency of the process and to establish the credibility of the elections, the PRO explained.

As to how the commission will deal with the reports, Ward could not say as there was no decision yet by the commission on that matter.

GECOM was able to complete 25 boxes on Wednesday, 40 on Thursday and 43 on Wednesday bringing the total to 108 of the 2,339 ballot boxes to be counted as of May 08.

The tabulations exercise of the Statements of Recount (SOR’s) saw 74 boxes processed out of the 108 for the General Elections and 63 boxes for the Regional elections.