More procedural errors admitted to
More procedural errors were admitted to when the elections petition convened yesterday. Stanley Singh the chief election officer (CEO) was grilled by Senior Counsel Rex McKay representing PNC leader Desmond Hoyte for the fourth morning, over his involvement in the 1997 elections. McKay furnished two statements of poll (SOP) with signatures varying greatly from those of the presiding officers for those polling stations--Michelle Haynes and Dexter Patterson--who had previously testified that they had not signed any documents. Haynes had testified on November 2, that she had prepared her SOP but did not know she had to sign the document as well. She had not disputed the results on the SOP. Yesterday, the CEO could not say whether those two SOPs were among the ones he had previously admitted rewriting but acknowledged the great variance in the signatures could raise the suspicion of them being forgeries and that "if they were forgeries would have formed part of the final results." "Were the rewritten SOPs also counted in the final tally?" asked McKay. "Yes, with other substantiating evidence," he replied, admitting that votes from the 160 SOPs "unsigned for reasons still unclear," were counted. The witness said that "crucial advice at the last moment was ignored with SOPs being locked in ballot boxes." But he could not say how many had been placed there. McKay then accused the Elections Commission of "extending its job to include the declaration of the results thereby usurping the position of the regional officers" who were, according to the law, supposed to declare the results of their districts publicly. McKay asked the CEO why this provision had been inserted. "It was claimed in the past that the actual result of the poll was manipulated between the place of poll and the commission," he said. McKay gave him 100 per cent marks for this reply. The witness went on to explain that this claim had caused the counting and verification to be done at the polling station. As to the declaration of the returning officers, he said that because "agents and observers from the political parties would have been present and actually involved in tallying the results and therefore arriving at the final results... the actual physical announcement of the results to the public was deemed unnecessary." Despite the provision in the law the CEO had not in the Regional Officer's manual, instructed them to declare the results. McKay then turned to the number of unstamped and unfolded ballots. The witness recalled "there were a few instances where presiding officers were careless in collecting material and would have arrived at the polling place without a stamp or stamp pad." Additionally, "when you were in a push... with a crowd you could forget to stamp a ballot." He said he was not in a position to deny the testimony of one witness that there were large numbers of unstamped ballots but refused to say that it would raise suspicion in one's mind that something was wrong. "Not in the mind of anyone who knew the system," he said. He confirmed that he had heard of uncreased ballots being found in boxes and said that it was true that for a ballot to enter the small hole of the ballot box it had to be creased. "Did you enquire into these pristine ballot papers?" asked McKay. "No," he replied. McKay opened cross examination yesterday by asking the CEO to provide the court with a letter replying to one by Donna Harris, a supervisor at the computer section of the Elections Commission, dated January 14, which had raised concerns over discrepancies in the numbers on some ballot boxes and those numbers assigned at the Elections Commission. McKay said the CEO's reply dated the following day had "never addressed a single allegation made by Harris in her letter." But the CEO suggested that at that time he did not see this to be relevant "until we had returning officers' returns properly documented... typed out and easy to read." Instead, the witness said that he had wanted a computer printout to help prepare the official results of the election. The petition will continue today. It was brought by Esther Perreira on the grounds that the 1997 election process was so flawed as to be unable to accurately reflect the will of the people.
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