After a month of ventilating concerns to the elections commission over the vote count, the party said it got no response and was left with no other option but to go to court.

The petition was filed in the name of the party's Region 10 candidate, Walter Melville, who said that the AFC gained 3,321 votes in the Region, 48 more than the PPP/C, which was awarded the geographic constituency seat for the Region. As a result, he is asking that the court find that the polls in the district were not lawfully conducted or might have been affected by an unlawful act or omission, resulting in the need for parliamentary seats to be reallocated. Alterna-tively, he is seeking a declaration that the number of valid votes that were cast differs from the votes used to allocate the seats in the National Assembly, making it necessary for the elections commission to do a review.

This is the second elections petition that has been filed following the August 28 general elections, which saw the incumbent PPP/C win a parliamentary majority. The PPP/C won 36 seats, the PNCR-1G, 22, the AFC, 5, GAP-ROAR, 1 and the TUF, 1. Last month, a candidate for the main opposition PNCR also filed a petition challenging the validity of the polls, charging that there were "unlawful acts" and "omissions" that affected the outcome. The proceedings in that matter have not yet begun.

Chief Election Officer Gocool Boodoo is named as a respondent in the AFC petition, along with representatives for the parliamentary parties.

According to Melville's petition, the AFC's Khemraj Ramjattan and Sheila Holder, at a meeting with Boodoo on September 1st, indicated that there was a discrepancy in the results declared for District 10 since the results of all ballot boxes were not included in the final declaration. There were also subsequent concerns publicly raised over the alleged discrepancy on a number of occasions afterward.

Melville says Boodoo undertook to investigate the claim and he also promised copies of the Statements of Poll (SOPs) which were necessary for the party do a verification exercise of its own. These were delivered on October 4, almost a month after President Bharrat Jagdeo was sworn in, and the parties were notified of the parliamentary seat allocation. The declared results were gazetted in the Official Gazette on October 20, and the results for the Region 10 constituency listed the AFC as having secured 3,166 votes and the PPP/C 3,189. Both the PNCR, which had the largest share of the votes for the Region, and the PPP/C were awarded geographical constituency seats for Region 10.

But Melville deposed that after the declaration of the results Boodoo, AFC scrutineers, and other observers determined that several polling stations were not included in the declaration for the Region. Among these were the Watooka Primary School, Lyndon Johnson Community Centre I-Z, New Silver City Secondary School, Wisroc Nursery School, and Kwakwani Primary School. He says according to the SOPs provide by the elections commission, the AFC confirmed the votes cast in these ballots and if included the final aggregate would show the party securing 3,321 votes as against 3,273 for the PPP/C. Moreover, it is also claimed that the change of numbers does affect the total allocation of seats to the Parliament, and as a result, the lists from which Members of Parliament (MPs) are drawn.

On October 16, the AFC requested a meeting with Boodoo about declared results for the region. It is argued that on October 20, Boodoo met with AFC representatives and explained that he could do nothing since the results had already been gazetted the day before. He also suggested that the AFC's computation might have been incorrect, since corrections had to be made to some SOPs. Additionally, he also pointed out that the AFC's Region 10 assistant chief scrutineer had signed off on the results used for the final declaration.