Electoral Commission has no records of previous elections
Media houses, researchers, historians alike are somewhat stupefied at the fact that currently there are no official records of the results from past elections held in this country. That is to say the official custodian of such information, the Electoral Commission does not have these records. Even if political parties and institutions like libraries and international electronic research tool providers such as WIKIPEDIA do have this information, it cannot be used as official reference.
Seychelles did under the previous Electoral Commission maintain updated records of all election activities in the country since the return to multi-party politics. These records were available on the site of the Electoral Commission. Unfortunately the new EC seems to have lost all the data pertaining to these elections. How did such a thing happen and who is responsible?
The question was put to the Electoral Commission earlier this year as preparations for the October elections started earnestly. At the time, while the EC did admit that it currently does not have these records, it was not forthcoming with the reason as to why this is so. The EC did however say that it was re-compiling these records and they would be made available eventually. Unfortunately as yet the said information is still not on the EC website.
While there is an understanding that putting all this info together again will require quite a lot of work and that at the moment the EC is busy with the actual holding of the elections preparations; it is worth pointing out that the records were lost quite early in the tenure of the new EC and that something should have been done immediately back then to restore them.
It is alleged that the issue arose out of a human error which resulted in all the records present on a hard drive from the previous EC being irreversibly wiped out, a few weeks after the new EC was sworn in… unlike others needing to have access to the records, it is fairly Easy for the EC to retrieve them if the necessary procedures for archiving and safeguarding documents from these elections were adhered to. The EC could go back to the archives and get the sealed results from the elections and rebuild its own records. Alternatively it could ask the international organisations to which Seychelles is a member (e.g. the Commonwealth,) and which require such information to be sent to them officially once elections are over, and as such it could have the same to make available on its website. As it is, the work of analyzing and comparing results has been made that much harder for those who have to do it, simply because the EC failed in this important aspect.
