The Op­po­si­tion Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress and rul­ing Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment yes­ter­day ac­cused each oth­er of can­vass­ing and caus­ing oth­er prob­lems in var­i­ous mar­gin­al ar­eas dur­ing the Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment Elec­tion.

The UNC al­leged that in­duce­ments were of­fered, cit­i­zens were not al­lowed to vote and there were prob­lems with Elec­tion and Bound­aries Com­mis­sion (EBC) of­fi­cials in some ar­eas. The Op­po­si­tion al­so claimed the dri­ver of a UNC can­di­date was al­leged­ly beat­en up.

By 3 pm yes­ter­day, nine hours in­to vot­ing, Op­po­si­tion leader Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar ex­pressed con­cern over re­port­ed in­ci­dents and ir­reg­u­lar­i­ties with the vot­ing process.

“This is cause for alarm. This cam­paign was fraught with is­sues ... PNM used every tac­tic to try to de­flect at­ten­tion from their in­abil­i­ty to gov­ern,” she said.

She added: “We’ve had sev­er­al ex­am­ples in which it seems the EBC of­fi­cials haven’t been con­sis­tent in their ap­pli­ca­tion of the law. While over 130 re­turn­ing of­fi­cers al­lowed per­sons wear­ing sim­i­lar-coloured green t-shirts to ac­cess polling sta­tions as polling agents, in at least two sep­a­rate re­port­ed in­stances—in Diego Mar­tin and San­gre Grande—our polling agents were pro­hib­it­ed be­cause the re­turn­ing of­fi­cer felt the green colour was too close to yel­low. Our at­tor­neys were forced to step in to re­solve it.

“There are mul­ti­ple in­stances in which polling agents sched­uled to work at poll sta­tions were re­port­ed­ly ap­proached by per­sons rep­re­sent­ing an­oth­er po­lit­i­cal par­ty and of­fered in­duce­ments to stand down. How­ev­er, our polling agents re­main­ing com­mit­ted, turned out to work.”

The UNC leader said an in­ci­dent of a PNM can­di­date al­leged­ly block­ing vot­ers was al­so re­port­ed to the po­lice.

She fur­ther al­leged that Ra­jeesh Ramd­han, of Va­len­cia, a dri­ver for UNC Can­di­date Darielle Williams-Cum­mings, was dri­ving around on elec­tion du­ties when five men “jumped” him and beat him up and robbed him of his cell phone val­ued at $500.

UNC PRO Ani­ta Haynes said in Moru­ga the par­ty re­port­ed to the po­lice and EBC of­fi­cials that a per­son had gone in­to the par­ty’s sta­tion in that area and re­moved ma­te­ri­als.

“Peo­ple iden­ti­fied the woman as be­ing from PNM. Po­lice spoke to her,” she said.

“We re­ceived re­ports of al­leged in­duce­ments of­fered in Ota­heite. At 9.20 am we got a re­port of a (named PNM of­fi­cial) of­fer­ing peo­ple $200 at a La­dy Hailes pa­n­yard. There was al­so re­port of al­leged PNM can­vass­ing in San­gre Grande South.”

Cou­va South MP Rudy In­dars­ingh said in mar­gin­al Cal­i­for­nia/Pt Lisas, some of­fi­cers didn’t go through binders to look for peo­ple’s names as is usu­al­ly done.

“In a group of 12 peo­ple, one was al­lowed to vote. Peo­ple were be­ing turned away,” he said

Fyz­abad MP Bar­ry Padarath said he en­coun­tered prob­lems to vote in Cou­va, where EBC of­fi­cers called him “Bar­ry Bara” and were un­sure of what they were do­ing. He cit­ed oth­ers hav­ing sim­i­lar ex­pe­ri­ences and ac­cused the EBC of mak­ing “blun­der af­ter blun­der.”

Per­sad-Bisses­sar said she was al­so aware that an­oth­er par­ty used ve­hi­cles with EBC stick­ers is­sued by the po­lice to trans­port per­son­nel in bor­oughs and cities.

“Our lawyers ad­vised this isn’t in keep­ing with the Rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the Peo­ple Act which ad­vis­es the re­gion­al mu­nic­i­pal­i­ties and the ra­tio of cars per­mis­si­ble.

UNC gen­er­al sec­re­tary Dave Tan­coo wrote the Po­lice Com­mis­sion­er on the mat­ter.