Although the Labour Party waited till 2am on Monday 10 March to accept defeat in the 8 March general election, the party’s leadership knew within an hour after votes started being counted (ie at around mid-day on Sunday, 9 March) that it had lost the election.

This was admitted by Louis Gatt, the head of the Labour Party electoral office in a reaction to the report on the Labour defeat by the commission set up by the party.

The Louis Gatt reaction counteracts the criticism of the party’s electoral machinery published in the report, but in so doing it also undermines part of what was said by Alfred Sant when he spoke in Parliament two weeks ago.

In particular, Dr Sant had claimed abuse in the tickets and allocations by Air Malta to bring people over to vote.

Mr Gatt said his office had received around 400 phone calls. The principal difficulty, he explained, was that many wanted to come to Malta not earlier than Thursday 6 March and return not later than 10 March, probably for work reasons.

In his speech, Dr Sant had claimed abuse by Air Malta and the PN. Mr Gatt said his office protested with the airline and several times with the Electoral Commission and it was only after his strong protests that things improved.

Mr Gatt defended the volunteers in the party electoral office from the report’s charges that it was “business as usual”. Some of the volunteers did not want to work outside party headquarters while others also helped out in the districts.

Access to the party database is not restricted to the electoral office but to many other offices at party HQ. The database is updated every six months following the publication of an electoral register, but it is not true that 20 per cent of the database is incorrect.

Mr Gatt also countered a suggestion in the report that the PN have a better database and asked how the commission members got to know about it.

It is true that following the removal of the embarkation cards it is now more difficult to prove that a voter was out of the country, but the electoral office still instituted court proceedings although a top official of the party said this smacked of the past.

Having listed the around 800 helpers the party had in its election effort, Mr Gatt defended the way the party agents had behaved at the counting hall and said very few left their post and most stayed on and did their duty.

He also claimed it was through party agents that the situation at St Vincent de Paule was rectified and the party had obtained the majority of votes there.

As regards the extension of voting by an hour, Mr Gatt echoed what Dr Falzon said elsewhere – that the decision was taken by the Electoral Commission, which is autonomous. Nor did it take the decision because a protest was lodged by PN between 3 and 4pm, nor because he himself had informed the Electoral Commission in the morning that queues were building up at places like Zejtun, Valletta, and so on, and that some people had left without voting. The Electoral Commission has its own officers at each polling place and knows the situation in real time, Mr Gatt said.