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‘We are convinced we didn’t lose elections!’ – SVG Opp. Party Leader Arnhim U. Eustace
Following the elections on December 9, 2015, the NDP ended up with seven seats to the Unity Labour Party (ULP) of Dr The Honourable Ralph E. Gonsalves eight seats.
However, Eustace and his supporters believe the elections were fraudulent and they have refused to be part of any swearing in.
Irregularities & elections fraud?
Speaking exclusively with Virgin Islands News Online by telephone this morning, Mr Eustace said his party is convinced it won the constituency of Central Leeward, which would tip the scales in its favour overall. The NDP’s candidate for the Central Leeward seat was Ben Exeter. However, official results declared the ULP’s Louis Straker as winning the seat.
“During the elections there were a number of irregularities and indeed I would say fraud. In some constituencies you have ballot boxes and polling stations where there is 100 percent turnout and in others it even went past 100 percent turnout which is entirely impossible,” Eustace said.
“Now because of that and some other activities that we have discovered [we believe] that there are a lot of other irregularities. There are persons who have voted, who are not in St Vincent and the Grenadines, yet they voted,” he said.
Tampered ballots
Eustace alleged too that it was discovered at some polling stations that the counterfoils on the ballots had been cut off, even below the perforation of the counterfoil. “So you can’t even tell whether they had been signed or not by the person supervising.”
He said too that in one constituency there were reportedly ballot boxes from three polling stations which had no seals on them and therefore could have been tampered with.
“We are convinced that we did not lose that elections. In fact we know that the number of ballots that have been cut off are more than the number of votes that the candidate got for the Government. So we really believe that we won that seat.”
According to Eustace, there is a team of lawyers working on a legal challenge and the first approach to the courts will be sometime today.
“In the meantime we have launched a civil disobedience campaign and yesterday from about 9:00 am to about 5:00 pm our people have been on the street demonstrating and marching and so forth and we will continue that today,” he told Virgin Islands News Online.
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