Faber Says Voter Fraud Contributed to Loss in Collet

Recently, Party Leader Tracy Taegar-Panton and members of the UDP visited Cayo North to meet with election workers and scrutinizers about serious concerns during the recent general election. Allegations include voters photographing ballot sheets, misusing the proxy vote system, and participating in fraudulent voter transfers. Former Collet Area Representative Patrick Faber explained how these issues might have contributed to his recent loss in the constituency he held for over twenty years.

 

Patrick Faber, Former Area Representative, Collet

“ I’m not one who cries for all of these things, but I think something must be said. And I applaud the people of Cayo North for sounding the alarm before Omar Figueroa and the Cayo North folks, for instance succeeded in the court to prove fraud when it came to those voters that were transferred illegally. We would’ve thought, oh, these things just are run of the mill, spoken about, but not real until we saw where, there was some gain made in terms of proving it in the court. And I think that sent a signal for the nation. Even though as we look at what happened during the election, there is no doubt in my mind that some of those same irregularities happened in Collet. There was an abundance of people coming to vote along with the PUP operatives who claim all of a sudden, these are people who have known all my ideas in Collet all my twenty-five years or so in Collet, all of a sudden they can’t read, they can’t hold a pen, they don’t know how to mark an X. These things were very real. I complained to our returning officer on record quite a few times about photographing ballots that was very real on election day. Again, while personally I am not one to sit down and cry about the results, these things are very real. It may be, as I said in my post about Cayo North, not something that we want to use to try to overturn the election results now, but if we don’t pay attention to these things because they’re very real, if we don’t pay attention to them and make complaints about them this system of democracy that we practice in this country that we’ve enjoyed so a very long will crumble if those of us who have something to say and know what’s going wrong, don’t say anything about it, we are going to suffer the consequences.”