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#4390: Driver answers Carey about rushing to judgment (fwd)
From: Tom F. Driver <tfd3@columbia.edu>
I'm replying to thiis from Chip Carey:
Tom Driver comments "With regard to the method the CEP used to
tally the votes, it seems to me there's been quite a lot of rushing to
judgment."
Is that why the OAS complained that the vote counts were not
finished? The electoral commission admitted that it was not counting
all the names, even though the 1999 electoral law requires it. I
suspect Leon Manus will name a few others who have been rushing
the tally in his press conference expected in Boston later this week.
The ones I think have been rushing to judgment are many members of the
press, Kofi Annan at the UN, and some contributors to Corbett's list. As for
the OAS, its error was to have been too slow. That is to say, if the OAS
wanted properly to challenge the methods of the CEP's computation of vote
results, it should have raised the point BEFORE the elections. How so?
Because the same methods had been used in previous elections from 1990
on without challenge. Therefore, the OAS, as a knowledgeable body, should
have known what to expect.
It's my guess, purely a guess, that if the opposition to Lavalas had done well
in the May 21 elections, the method of calculating the results would never
have been questioned. The OAS timing of its challenge has, as Gerard Jean-
Juste said to the Corbett list recently, "made a chaotic situation worse."
There are those in Washington as well as Port-au-Prince who are glad of that.
-------------
Tom F. Driver
Sheffield, MA
<tfd3@columbia.edu>