The results of the March 9, 2013 general election is what it is. There was a winner and a loser. Life has to go on in the most normal way of a democratic country. The people accepted the result.
However, with regard to what took place in the Naxxar counting hall , with regard to a number of ‘misplaced’ ballot papers, the people are still perplexed by the fact that there could be such discrepancies in the process.
The most salient electoral districts were the 8th and the 13th where some irregularities were detected in the course of the counting process. It is said that in the 8th district a packet of 50 votes was given to the wrong candidate instead of to the legitimate one.
It is to be said that the error was that the tag-band was wrongly marked and the counting staff placed it in the wrong place.
Such an error does not look so dubious as to cause some big problem in the process. It is normal that errors are detected in later counts, though this is always detrimental to the respective candidate.
In the 13th district it was said that there was a discrepancy of 10 votes. Following the opening of all ballot boxes and reconciliation with the ballot paper account, the total of votes are to be considered as valid votes polled other than the invalid ones which are declared as such at the very beginning of the process.
Once the total of valid votes is declared, this has to be carried out and reconciled in every count that would follow.
In one of the counts it transpired that about 10 votes could not be accounted for. Following a recount, the ‘missing’ 10 votes were unaccounted for. It is said that this number of votes would be considered as being non-transferrable.
At this stage, it seems that the Nationalist Party’s agents were caught napping because they should have drawn the attention of their quarter’s chiefs to stop completely the whole process unless the 10 votes were relatively accounted for. These 10 votes were detrimental to the candidate who was not elected by a handful of votes.
The PN candidates went to court to contest these errors.
It was quite obvious that lawyer Paul Lia, representing the Labour candidate, would argue that this once the respective candidates were in fact to be elected in virtue of the constitutional provision.
This bone of contention was also argued by lawyer Ian Refalo who stated that “if you recount every count, God knows how many mistakes will be found”. He further stated that, after all, the candidate(s) would take their seats in Parliament.
In its decision, the court said that it could not exclude that there could be circumstances where the interest of absolute correctness overcame that of having quick certainty but this did not apply in this case as both candidates were not going to be prejudiced in any way. The court may be right but I feel it opted for a modus vivendi as a matter of convenience in the circumstances.
Yet, the crux of the matter is that, although it is true that the two candidates would still be taking their seats in Parliament, for the sake of argument, the PN lost two seats in the process of electing their candidates and the PL would have two fewer candidates.
Whatever would be the final outcome of these circumstances, I strongly believe that the man in the street has every a right to be informed about what really took place in the counting process.
Somebody, somewhere has to give an adequate explanation.