Africa-Press – Namibia. THE Electoral Commission of Namibia must carry out a recount of votes cast in last year’s regional council election in the Kavango East region’s Ndonga Linena constituency, the Electoral Court has ordered.
The court yesterday ordered that a recount should be done within 10 days.
Deputy judge president Hosea Angula and judges Orben Sibeya and Esi Schimming-Chase also declared the announcement of the election result in the constituency and the swearing-in of Swapo candidate Michael Kampota as regional councillor, as null and void.
The All People’s Party (APP), represented by lawyer Henry Shimutwikeni, first filed a case in the Electoral Court in January, when they asked the court to order a recount of votes cast in the Ndonga Linena constituency in the regional council election on 25 November last year.
At the heart of the party’s application was a claim that some 40 ballots were wrongly rejected when votes cast in the election were counted.
The APP claimed the rejected ballots had markings on which indicated the choice of candidate that the voter using each ballot had made, but that the ballots were nevertheless rejected and not included among votes which were counted.
Swapo candidate Michael Kampota was declared the winner and sworn in as regional councillor for the Ndonga Linena constituency after he received 12 more votes than APP candidate Daniel Djami.
Kampota received 1 073 votes, while Djami had 1 061 votes. Two candidates from the Popular Democratic Movement and the Independent Patriots for Change received 146 and 70 votes, respectively.
According to the APP, its polling agents observed that 40 ballots were rejected at polling stations in the constituency because the voters who cast the ballots made a marking on the photographs of a candidate on the ballot, instead of in the open space next to the photograph.
The party also claimed its polling agents objected to the rejection of the ballots, without success, and that the markings made on the rejected ballots were clear enough to establish which candidates the voters meant to choose.
In June, the Electoral Court ordered that the Electoral Commission of Namibia (ECN) should make 57 ballots which were rejected in the constituency’s regional council election available to the APP to be copied.
The ballots were made available to the party at an ECN logistics store in Windhoek on 12 July, APP secretary general Vinsent Kanyetu said in a sworn statement filed at the court.
Kanyetu stated that according to the ECN’s records, 57 ballots were rejected at 11 ballot stations and mobile polling points in the constituency.
However, when ECN officials opened 11 regional election ballot boxes from the constituency in July, only four ballots which had been marked as rejected were found, Kanyetu said.
In one of the ballot boxes, an envelope marked as containing rejected ballots was also found, with 16 ballots in the envelope, but none of those had been endorsed as rejected either, Kanyetu said.
Noting that the difference in the number of votes counted for the Swapo and APP candidates was only 12, Kanyetu stated: “At this stage it is clearly certain that the errors made have the potential to alter the outcome of the election.”
He added that an inspection of the 16 ballots found in an envelope showed some of them should have been counted, but were not. The fact that those ballots had been rejected and were not counted contravened the Electoral Act, Kanyetu claimed.
