‘Even if pre-election and election day processes go well, a flawed vote count or vote tabulation can fatally undermine the integrity and credibility of the electoral process and decrease public confidence and public acceptance of the results’ (Carter Center Disappointed Not to Be Able to Return to Guyana.
I will return to this issue later, but please note that it is common knowledge that the integrity of voter registration is critical to free and fair elections, and in the case of Guyana I have said that ‘Once one of the significant parties insists that the electoral list is flawed an objective effort must be made to fix the problem before elections are held’ (SN: 11/09/2019).
In the 2017 elections in Kenya, nine international monitoring teams including the Carter Center, the European Union (EU), the African Union (AU), and the Commonwealth commended the Kenyan electoral management body for the conduct of the elections that were later annulled by the Supreme Court.
‘However, in defending its work in Kenya, the Carter Center, whose mission was led by former Secretary of State John Kerry, drew attention to its August 10th statement that ‘election day voting and counting processes had functioned smoothly but that the electronic transmission of results proved caed45359c1f83d87).
Why, even on the eve of elections, did the Carter Center’s pre-election assessment, while rightly alerting stakeholders to the tabulation process, neglect to draw attention to the possibility of fraudulent use of the bloated list?
