Justice Singh had ruled that an election is not invalidated if anomalies do not substantially change the outcome

May 20, 2020 Letters

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Dear Editor,

Apart from making Guyana win top spot in the Guinness Book of Records for the longest count of election votes on both an absolute and per capita basis, GECOM’s conduct of the recount has not been short of clownishness. Some weeks ago, I referred to Claudette Singh, GECOM’s Chairman as heading a circus. Claudette is helped by a huge pool to draw from. As the defeat of the APNU+AFC is confirmed by each ballot recounted, both desperation and clownishness seem to have affected the Coalition’s leaders and their surrogates.
The most recent victim is Amna Ally, General Secretary of the PNC-R who on Friday told the media that one dead voter would invalidate the elections – the APNU+AFC’s Plan D after the Mingo/Lowenfield skit failed to deliver the swearing in of their leader David Arthur Granger. Had Ally used her recent attempts to engage Claudette Singh to ask her about the case brought by PNC-R supporter Esther Perreira adjudicated by the same Claudette Singh, she would have learnt that Singh said in that case the following: “In other words, even if an unlawful act or omission is proved, the election would be valid if the conduct of the election was substantially in accordance with the electoral laws and the unlawful act or omission did not affect the result.”
Ally might also not have learnt about the part of the Esther Perreira decision in which Claudette Singh stated that in election petition matters, the petitioner has to prove her case on “a preponderance of probability”. What is coming out from people like Coretta McDonald, James Bond, Ayodele Roach, Carol Joseph, Kidackie Amsterdam, Christopher Jones and Sherrod Duncan are mere fishing expeditions, meant to waste time and stretch the life of a twice-illegal government. They are of no evidentiary value.
And shortly before Ally, elections cognoscente and GECOM’s self-appointed spokesperson Vincent Alexander told the media that if the votes in one of a hundred boxes could not be counted because the box was soaked, then there should be a by-election! No Mr. Alexander, the national PR system does not work that way. Both Alexander and the Chair know that the only problem facing GECOM is the fraudulent tabulation of the Region Four votes by Mingo and Lowenfield inchoate attempt to act upon it. This circus, and the waste of taxpayers’ money, could have ended long ago if Singh and Alexander were committed to doing the right thing and demand the SOP’s from the Mingo/Lowenfield duo.
Of course, the first aspirants to Claudette Singh’s pool was crime sleuth extraordinaire Khemraj Ramjattan who, using his special lens, detected the work of Russian hacks who were able to penetrate the homes, offices and safes of all the officials holding the original copies of the statements of polls, cleverly erasing and inflating the APNU+AFC’s numbers and deflating the PPP/C’s numbers so that they could match Mingo’s! Ramjattan’s astuteness was emulated by his colleague David Patterson who opposed live streaming because it was an industrial relations/human rights issue. And showing a facility with maths invented by the AFC leadership, he argued against the consecutive counting of the Regions votes because “to recount each region one at a time doesn’t make sense. By the time you get to Region Four, we will be probably in day 35.” Poor David, a quantity surveyor with a supposed facility with figures, is infected with fake maths, which tell him that the duration of the count will be shortened if the votes of the Regions were recounted concurrently rather than consecutively. The mathematical fabric of this country has been destroyed for a generation or two – thanks to the AFC leadership and the Court of Appeal.
Harmon, Trotman and Broomes held up Granger on March 5 in Lamaha Street and told him that he had won the elections. He seemed a bit dazed, spoke hurriedly and made a quick exit. Now, after all the clownish displays, subterfuges, denials of international observers and most pathetic attempts to discredit the voting on March 2, Aubrey Norton, PNC-R Executive Member and no stranger to rigged elections by his party, is claiming that the same results under which they were vigorously clamouring to install Granger – in a historic use of other people’s language – is now questioning the credibility of the elections.
But let me explain Norton. His incredibility about the elections is that with just about every advantage conceivable, the APNU+AFC lost the elections by no small margin. GECOM was clearly in its corner, if not its pocket. Indeed, had it not been for such partisanship and quite a bit of fraud, the APNU+AFC would already have been confirmed as losers, sparing the country the risk of international sanction. Having the elections regulator on your side is clearly worth a bit. Sadly, I have to state that I think that the Court’s failure to act sensibly in some cases and decisively in others also gave GECOM and the APNU+AFC time to play with the Voters List and consumed in no small measure the energy of the opposition. The Coalition had the Consolidated Fund at its disposal, and the big contractors in their corner – all worth millions of real dollars. It had incumbency – that too worth a few percentage points. It had and continues to have the executive, including the Government, the State agencies, the Army, the Police, the streets. You are right, Norton. Not only is it incredible that they could lose, they really deserved to lose.

Yours truly,
Christopher Ram

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