Opposition leader Lennox Linton threatened that his UWP party will be going to the law courts to challenge the 2019 general election results. The DLP won 18 seats out of the total 21 seats, but the UWP contends that the election was rigged and that they will not recognize the new DLP government.
Linton said his party will challenge the elections in court and that the UWP is putting evidences of gross irregularities together to be used against the DLP in court. He said the party’s legal team will soon file a lawsuit in this regard.
“We are going to court with this matter,” Linton told UWP supporters. “We have not had much success in the court over the years but that is neither here nor there. It is a tool that we have that we will continue to use. One of the planks on which we are moving forward is a court challenge and we are in the processing of assembling the evidence working with our legal team.”
The opposition accuses the government of rigging the elections by sponsoring 8,000 Dominicans overseas and paying for their flight and sea tickets to come vote at home. Linton said things went wrong during the elections and that these things must be set straight again. The government however denies any wrongdoing during the entire voting process and international observers said the elections were free and fair.
In a related development, Barbadian pollster Peter Wickham has challenged the UWP and the CCM to support their allegations of electoral fraud with hard evidence. Wickham said the opposition’s claim that 8,000 people were imported into the country to vote is not consistent with airport and seaport authorities’ report that only 2,700 people came into the country a week to the elections.
Linton responded by saying that Wickham must be one of the DLP machinery used to commit electoral fraud in Dominica. CCM’s Loftus Durand said Wickham is only running his mouth since he knows nothing about the political reality in Dominica. Dominican pollster Alex Bruno also dismissed Wickham’s claims, saying he is meddling in what he does not understand.
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