UN Secretariat's Miscount in Human Rights Council Vote Remains Unexplained
By Matthew Russell Lee
May 29, 2008
The Inner City Press 
Original Source: http://www.innercitypress.com/hrc2kerimerror052908.html
UNITED NATIONS, May 29 -- What explains the UN Secretariat's vote counting being wrong by ten whole ballots of a mere 189 cast in the May 21 Human Rights Council voting? Despite Inner City Press on Thursday asking both Ban Ki-moon's Deputy Spokesperson and her counterpart for the President of the General Assembly, no explanations has been proffered. The PGA's spokesman guessed that one abstention became ten by the addition of a zero. He said that in the future, optical scanning technology is being considered. But counting 189 votes, without missing by ten, is something most elementary schools can do. 
   PGA Srgjan Kerim's May 22 letter to Ambassadors (but not the public) admitted
I have been informed by the Secretariat that there were two recording errors by the Secretariat: one in the number of abstention ballots and the other in the number of Members voting. The registration for abstention should have been 1 (one) instead of  10 and the number  of Members voting should have been 189 (192 ballots received, minus two invalid ballots, minus one abstention ballot) instead of 182. 
  Since the errors were by the Secretariat, on Thursday Inner City Press asked, as transcribed
On elections, there is a letter from the President of the General Assembly, Mr. Kerim, saying that the voting for the Human Rights Council...  He said that the Secretariat -- so I am assuming that is the Secretariat -- informed him of errors.  Instead of 10 abstentions there was one, and instead of 189 votes there were 182.  So there are sort of... big problems with the counting of votes last week.  Can you explain… Is that the Secretariat’s role to count the votes?
Deputy Spokesperson:  This is the first I have heard of it.  Let me look into it and get back to you [Video here, from Minute 11:10]
   To try to ensure a response, Inner City Press followed-up by e-mailing a copy of the PGA's letter to the Deputy Spokesperson in order to ask and get an answer 
1) which unit(s) of the Secretariat were involved in counting the votes on May 21?

2) how and why did they over-report abstentions by a power of 10, and undercount the votes count?

3) what is the Secretariat doing about these errors?

4) what other UN system elections do these units of the Secretariat work on?

  Also, yesterday's Serry question, and the still unanswered OLA questions.
  But ten hours later, no answer had been sent to Inner City Press. Into the UN's transcript, a statement on an unrelated issue was inserted. So how did the Secretariat so badly miscount the votes? We will continue on this story.