The long and winding road to Guyana’s 2020 election results · Global Voices
The Court of Appeal hearing regarding Guyana's elections recount case, which took place on July 25, 2020. Screenshot taken from the Stabroek News livestream of the hearing.
Guyana's general election took place on March 2, 2020, a year after it was constitutionally due, but although the ballots have long been counted, the country still has not declared a winner.
It's been an extraordinarily slow road to get to this point, with developments happening in almost imperceptible increments. When ExxonMobil announced on June 30, 2016, that it had made a “world-class discovery” of oil offshore Guyana, the news changed, in one fell swoop, both the country's economic outlook and its political stakes.
By December 2018, Guyana's parliament had voted “yes” to a no-confidence motion brought by the opposition People's Progressive Party (PPP) against the governing coalition A Partnership for National Unity/Alliance for Change (APNU+AFC). Despite the government launching a legal challenge to the parliamentary vote, it was deemed valid, and all eyes turned to the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) as it prepared for the impending election.
The latest twist in the ongoing controversy — which has pivoted around the integrity of the election results coming out of Region 4, a stronghold area for the governing coalition A Partnership for National Unity/Alliance for Change (APNU+AFC) — involves the re-verification of votes.
Recount results
After many false starts, a recount was finally underway by May 6, but it was slow going, with many inconsistencies and accusations of stalling.
More than a month later, on June 9, the Stabroek News ran a story in which several presiding officers from Region 4 polling stations said their deputy returning officers had instructed them not to place certain key documents in the ballot boxes. By then, the recount had been completed and the results confirmed that <PERSON>, Region 4's returning officer, had increased the government's numbers and reduced the votes for the opposition PPP.
It seemed a fait accompli that the revelation would result in GECOM having to declare the PPP, with 33 seats, the winner. Guyana has a total of 65 parliamentary seats — the recount showed that the APNU+AFC secured 31 of these, while a group of other parties got one seat — but things were about to get more complicated.
‘Valid’ votes
In Guyana's proportional representation electoral system, there are several steps to ensure voter legitimacy on election day. 327
Voters must provide photo identification in order to gain access to the voting booth. In casting their vote, the “X” denoting their preference must be clearly located next to the candidate/party of their choice, and each ballot paper must be stamped on both sides with a six-digit code. When votes are being counted, these criteria ensure validity.
Though the recount did unearth some differences in voting numbers, they were not significant; the final count was similar to the information listed on the Statements of Poll, the data by which election results must be verified. The initial results declared by <PERSON> had been read from a spreadsheet.
According to Guyanese law, the validity of votes can only be challenged through an election petition after the overall election result has been declared and a government is in place — at which point, an investigation will be done and the case tried in court based on the evidence presented. Such a challenge cannot be made during the process itself.
However, an APNU+AFC supporter challenged the interpretation of the term “validity” laid out in Article 177 (4) of Guyana's Constitution, an action which questioned the credibility of GECOM's recount results.
The argument hinges on Article 177 (2b), which says that where there are two or more presidential candidates, if more votes are cast in favour of one than the other, the chair of GECOM shall declare the candidate with the greater number of votes to be president, “acting only in accordance with the advice of the Chief Election Officer.”
Chief Elections Officer <PERSON>, however, — despite instructions from GECOM Chair <PERSON> to include all the votes that were in keeping with the Statements of Poll — is of the opinion that a number of ballot boxes were corrupted. Contrary to what the law allows for, he has said that he's not prepared to include them in the count.
It is unclear how <PERSON> concluded that hundreds of thousands of votes were invalid, and accusations abound that this is another attempt by GECOM to rig the elections in favour of APNU+AFC. 39