United Workers Party and Opposition Leader Ron Green Loses Laplaine in Critical Recount

Ron Green, the United Workers Party and Opposition Leader has lost the Laplaine Constituency following an official recount of votes yesterday.

Green was declared the winner on Friday night after a preliminary count of the votes in what was considered one of the most important match-ups of the general elections. Out of the 1,442 ballots cast, he polled 727 votes while Senator Peter St.Jean, the Dominica Labour Party candidate polled 715 votes. There were 7 rejected ballots.

Following the official recount on Saturday, the Electoral Office overturned their previous decision and declared St.Jean the winner. He narrowly edged out the incumbent leader by two votes causing what is the easily the biggest upset in Dominica’s political history.

The victory in Laplaine also extended the DLP’s landslide victory at the December polls to eighteen seats (18) in the Dominica Parliament. No other party or leader in the history of Dominica’s electoral politics have been granted such an overwhelming mandate save the late Dame Mary Eugenia Charles in the 1980 elections when she polled seventeen (18) seats for the Dominica Freedom Party.

St.Jaan, speaking on the state-owned Dominica Broadcasting Station described the win as a people’s victory. “We are just claiming it as a people’s victory. It is a new day; it’s the dawning of a new day in the Laplaine constituency and for us right now we are just savoring our victory” he said. The victorious Labour candidate also described Green as being dejected after the recount. “He was crushed, he was broken, he was battered and he walked out of the police station feeling that the returning officer had cheated and the he was going to take up the matter legally” he added.

Green is yet to concede defeat or issue a public statement on the matter. However his Campaign Manager, Paul Joseph, told Lennox Linton on Q95’ “Between You and Me” that the incumbent Leader was robbed.

“We knew it was not going to be easy; we knew we were leading, but from the very moment that we got to know that two coaster buses and two ordinary buses were coming into the constituency we were expecting a greater defeat. So now to see that overnight we were leading (it was a remarkable campaign) and to see today that we were robbed, so to speak by two votes” he said.

Green and the Untied Workers party are widely expected to challenge Saturdays’ results in Laplaine. That challenge will more than likely rest on two arguments

Earlier on in the campaign, Green had accused the DLP of attempting to steal the elections by illegally recruiting and enticing Dominicans resident overseas to return home to vote in certain marginal constituencies for the expressed purpose of influencing the outcome of the general elections. Some 133 of these voters were targeted for Laplaine. While Dominica Central was not able to independently confirm the allegations, Green’s camp and supporters insisted that these voters were deployed in the constituency and used to steal the seat from the UWP leader.

However, St.Jean who says he expects a very serious legal battle in the days ahead, insists that they have done nothing wrong. We have not done anything that one can consider illegal. Laplaine was probably the constituency where we had the highest number of observers and so we are not perturbed by that” he said.

Even so, Bernard Don Christopher, a former member of the electoral commission , told Lennox Linton on Saturday on Q95’s ‘Between You and Me’ “that there must be a contest for [the Laplaine seat] because Peter St.Jean was a Senator and he continued to be a parliamentary secretary and he was disqualified from being a candidate.”

Whatever the case or argument, it seems certain that the final outcome of the Laplaine vote will be decided by the courts.