Of these 185,260 votes he allocated 125,010 to the coalition, and 56,628 to the PPP/C, in other words inverting the result of the recount which put that party ahead of the incumbent in government.
He described it in an accompanying letter as a report of the “valid and credible” votes of the general and regional elections, and that his calculations were in accordance with the Representation of the People Act.
His justification for departing from Justice Claudette Singh’s instruction to him to submit a report based on the recount of the votes in order to certify the final result (he did not submit that report by the deadline) was the Appeal Court ruling on Monday that the provision in the Constitu-tion referring to “more votes are cast” should be interpreted to mean “more valid votes are cast”.
This compares with the recount results showing that the PPP/C had 233,336 votes and APNU+AFC 217,920, which translates into 33 seats for the first-named party, 31 for the coalition and one for the joint list of LJP, ANUG and TNM.
It has always been a simple question of completing the tallying of the Region Four votes in accordance with the law in order to obtain a final result.
