Despite promising that the majority of the Local Government Elections results would have been made known by last night, the Guyana Elections Commission is still to begin releasing the results from across the country.  

The two major political parties have both been claiming early victories in a number of areas. 

While the PPP has indicated that it will hold on to the majority of Local Authority Areas and Neighbourhood Democratic Councils, the APNU believes it is set to hold on to the capital city and the major towns that were being targeted by the PPP to make a switch. 

Meanwhile, Pandemonium broke out at the Office of the Returning Officer (RO) for the City of Georgetown late last night after scores of Presiding Officers protested the long lines and the process to hand in their election documents, including Statements of Polls (SOPs) from the more than 300 Polling Stations across the city.

Some presiding officers complained about being made to wait in lines for more than four hours to hand in their documents. 

Medical personnel were summoned to the Critchlow Labour College location early this morning, as some presiding officers fell ill. Many of them were at work since 2 o clock on elections morning and were still at work at 2 o’ clock this morning.

GECOM maintained a steady silence overnight. 

Elections Commissioner, Vincent Alexander, who was on ground, said the process established for the receipt of the election documents from the various polling stations failed.

“We have a situation where I think that the system for the receipt is not an efficient system because initially the RO was apparently instructed that the RO should be the recipient of every Statement of Poll. Now, if you have 351 Polling Stations, with the RO being the singular recipient, you could understand that is induced chaos,” Alexander explained.

The Elections Commissioner said he was forced to intervene in the matter and offer some recommendations.

“The number of persons has moved from one to five but it’s still slow, still tedious and you still have a significant number of persons awaiting to be dealt with,” Commissioner Alexander said.

Alexander said he recommended that 15 Deputy Returning Officers (DROs) be put in place to assist with the processing of the documents.

Local Government Elections were held in 2016 after 22 years, and then again in 2018, and according to the Elections Commissioner, this is the first time that such an incident has occurred.

“This has not happened before. You know, people normally say leave well alone but there is a tendency by some people to think that those before them didn’t do a good job but they can do a better job but what we have here is an attempt to say you are doing a better job, and induce chaos,” Alexander said.

GECOM has not issued an official statement on the incident and is still to begin releasing results of the elections.

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