GECOM should note Mingo’s inflated votes during recount tabulation

GECOM should note Mingo’s inflated votes during recount tabulation – ANUG Chair

Jun 04, 2020 News

– Timothy Jonas

Chair of A New and United Guyana, Timothy Jonas told reporters yesterday that the party will be advocating for the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) to note every time that the actual results from a ballot box vary from the numbers produced by Region Four Returning Officer, Clairmont Mingo.

ANUG Chair, Timothy Jonas

So far, most of the other regions have been recounted, and sometime today, Region Four will be the only Region left to be completely recounted.
“When those boxes are called and counted, we will be following that count. And when the count is complete, we will be saying to the supervisor in charge that, if your count shows, as we are sure it will show 76 votes for APNU, and we see according to Mr. Mingo’s spreadsheet, 106 votes given by Mr. Mingo instead of 76, that information is on GECOM’s record.”
Jonas said that the party will be utilizing the 100+ statements of poll it has gathered for Region Four to compare. But he explained that the spreadsheet produced by Mr. Mingo is in GECOM’s possession, and that it should have no trouble accessing that record to do comparisons during the tabulation.
“ANUG is keeping a close eye because it’s now getting hot. We are being placed at a homestretch where it’s at a stage where it’s the contentious ballots left to count,” Jonas said.
The ANUG Chair added that the party will ask the supervisor in instances where there are variations, to note them on the observation sheet.
One issue he noted that could arise is that a supervisor may refuse to note an objection.
The attorney said that there has already been a pattern of ‘tyranny’ during the recount process, where a supervisor refuses to note an objection made by the party, while giving much more latitude to Coalition agents to delay the process.
“There has been a myriad of little acts of tyranny going on in there. They are designed to frustrate,” Jonas said.
“There has been a consistent pattern to allow by the APNU agent, not just an objection but to give him information.”
In many cases, parties’ representatives have said that Coalition agents may call scores of serial numbers, asking the supervisor whether those numbers were ticked off to indicate that those persons voted, and then object to the ticked numbers. APNU+AFC representative Aubrey Norton has confirmed this.
Jonas said that there are GECOM supervisors who, while they would give such latitude to Coalition agents, the same latitude is not afforded to parties like ANUG.
For instance, he said that when the supervisor is checking the list to see whether the name is ticked off, ANUG would ask to see the list and the request would be refused.
“There are some who will bend over backwards,” Jonas said, “to slow the process down, to accommodate unreasonable requests and when objection is taken, to decline to entertain the objection.”
He said that the party has complained verbally about the issue and that the matter has been discussed at meetings.
He said that he will inform the press if the supervisor refuses to note objections during the Region Four tabulation.
Jonas has said before that, from his observation of the operations of some staffers of GECOM, that the Secretariat is compromised. He said yesterday, “if I was anxious not to have Mr. Mingo exposed, now is the time that I would try to do something to try to interrupt the process.”
Kaieteur News has so far verifiably reported on how, for just 35 of the already recounted Region Four ballot boxes, Mingo subtracted 391 votes from the PPP/C, and added 1,514 votes to APNU+AFC. The Returning Officer is still employed by GECOM, and according to GECOM’s Public Relations Officer, Yolanda Ward, is acting as a registration officer in Region Five.