Justice Srem Sai criticises CODEO, media for pretending they can validate EC’s figures

Law lecturer, Justice Srem Sai, has criticised the media and election observers for not coming clean about their inability to properly validate some of the contested results declared by the Electoral Commission (EC) in the December 7 elections.

He said while the validity of EC’s collated and published figures for the election results are being challenged, the Commission must re-collate the pink sheet figures from the polling stations instead of merely restating the contested collated results.

“The logical implication from this explanation is that no one (whether a radio station, an observer group or an opinion leader) can corroborate the EC’s collated results without actually and independently (of the EC) collecting and collating the pink sheet figures.

“First of all, the Joys, the Citis and the CODEOs [Coaliton of Domestic Election Observers] of this world have no capacity to collect raw voter figures independently. Secondly, they have neither collected nor even attempted to collect or review the pink sheets of the polling stations in question,” he wrote on Facebook.

According to him, the results published on the websites of some of the media houses, based on which they called the elections, are most likely full of errors.

“All they [media and election observers] did was to sniff-sniff from and re-publish in a colorful and pompous manner the EC’s collated potentially flawed secondary data figures (and that explains why they all fell victims to the mistakes that the EC has made in their purported declaration so far).

“So, one would expect that these media houses and observer groups would be frank and tell the public that they’re not in the position to speak to the validity of the EC’s collated figures? Yet, they are there pretending to be corroborating the EC’s figures,” the law lecturer at GIMPA wrote on Facebook.

Read his full post below.