Louis Gatt, the vice president of the Labour Party, yesterday said the 10 votes that went missing in the last general election could have made a difference to a candidate but not to the result as a whole.
Mr Gatt took the witness stand in the case initiated by the Nationalist Party, which is claiming that mistakes made in the count gave Labour a parliamentary majority of nine, when the majority should have been seven.
The PN is claiming that a mistake was made in the eighth district, where a packet of 50 votes belonging to its candidate Claudette Buttigieg was mistakenly transferred to another PN candidate, Michael Asciak.
When Dr Asciak was eliminated, Labour’s Edward Scicluna was elected. On the 13th district, 10 votes for candidate Frederick Azzopardi had gone missing, helping Labour’s Justyne Caruana to get elected.
I’ve worked on 20 elections and mistakes are always made
Taking the witness stand, Mr Gatt, who is also vice head of the electoral section of the Labour Party, said he was a nominated member of the Electoral Commission which had two representatives from each party.
He said that he worked on at least 20 elections, including general elections, and mistakes were always made.
When it came to the mistake on the 13th district, he said that on the books there were 678 votes registered to PN candidate Paul Buttigieg but when they were checked there was a discrepancy of 10 votes.
These votes could not be found anywhere. The commission and party representatives looked everywhere for them including on the floor but they were gone. The PN asked for a recount but the commission decided that these votes were to be placed with the non-transferable votes.
As it was a small discrepancy, it could have made a difference to the candidate on that district but not to the party.
When it came to the mistake on the eighth district, Dr Asciak was excluded on the 14th count and one of the packets containing 50 votes was found to have been incorrectly given to him when they belonged to Ms Buttigieg.
The PN drew the attention of the commission to the mistake and it took a decision that these votes could not go back to Ms Buttigieg.
The case continues.