Lowenfield’s conduct demonstrates prejudice in favour of coalition – GCCI President

Jun 20, 2020 News

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The President of the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce and Industry (GCCI) Nicholas Deygoo-Boyer has written the Chair of the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) Justice Claudette Singh to inform her of a pattern of conduct by the Chief Elections Officer Keith Lowenfield which demonstrates prejudice in favour of the governing coalition, A Partnership for National Unity + Alliance for Change (APNU+AFC).

In his correspondence, written on behalf of the Chamber, Deygoo-Boyer documented the CEO’s conduct as documented by the GCCI as a local observer for the March 2 General and Regional Elections. He said that the Chamber has consequently lost confidence in the Chief Elections Officer to manage the GECOM Secretariat.
The Chamber President pointed out an obligation of observers, as per the Terms of Reference under The Rights and Privileges of Local/Domestic Observer to “inform the Elections Commission promptly of any irregularities that may affect the credibility of the election or prejudice the electoral process.”
It is on this premise that he tendered the complaint, to protect against “unfair and irregular actions” undertaken by the GECOM Secretariat, in a letter forwarded to The Carter Center, Caribbean Community (CARICOM), The Commonwealth of Nations, and Organisation of American States (OAS).
Lowenfield has become the centre of public attention, in recent days, as he is responsible for tendering a report to the Commission under Section 96 of the Representation of the People Act, in order for GECOM to execute its mandate of declaring the elections results and a President, pursuant to Article 177 of the Constitution of Guyana.
The Chief Elections Officer was required to submit that report by or before 1:00 pm on Thursday, by the direction of the Chair. However, he refused to do so, citing a court case which does not prevent him in any way from submitting the report, since no injunction has been granted.
This is one of the issues pointed out by Boyer, which demonstrate Lowenfield’s prejudice, especially when it is juxtaposed against Lowenfield’s conduct back in March, after Region Four Returning Officer Clairmont Mingo made an obviously fraudulent declaration in favour of the coalition. At the time, Lowenfield was not reserved in his preparation and submission of a report for the Commission using the results at that juncture which had placed the coalition in the lead, even as the High Court had granted interim injunctions preventing GECOM from moving forward.
In addition, this time around, Lowenfield claims that the elections cannot be ascertained to have met the standards of fairness and credibility for any of the electoral districts. In this case, he based his assertions on trumped up allegations of voter impersonation and procedural irregularities touted by the coalition.
However, as Boyer pointed out, the CEO was well equipped to determine and correct a more obvious and evident fraud on the part of Mingo back in March, as Lowenfield is in possession of the correct statements of poll which were prepared by presiding officers across the country at the close of poll.
The Chamber President pointed out, as well, that Lowenfield, as Mingo’s supervisor, failed to instruct Mingo accordingly with regard to the tabulation of the results of the Region Four elections using the statements of poll.
“We need not remind you,” Boyer said, “that these results would have incorrectly given the APNU-AFC party majority seats in Parliament and the Presidency. It is extraordinary that Mr. Lowenfield has wandered into discussing the credibility of the elections in his report but has not made a single mention of this glaring find.”
Even more recently, Lowenfield has prepared another tabulation which would give the coalition victory; albeit with a margin much more pronounced than Mingo’s fraudulent declarations would have it. Lowenfield’s revision of the recount results found its genesis in a campaign of misinformation and false reportage executed by the coalition from the beginning of the National Recount.
Despite many of the false claims and misinformed reports of the coalition being exposed in the press, Lowenfield in a report to the Commission, has declared the allegations to be “of substance”.
“Having seen the way in which the Chief Elections Officer (CEO), Keith Lowenfield, has elevated aspects of the Observation Reports into his report and representations to the Commission,” Boyer said, “we wish to formally record that in our assessment, the CEO’s report on the Observation Reports is prejudiced and represents a non-credible aspect of the recount exercise,” Boyer wrote.
He pointed out that, during the exercise, APNU+AFC agents called out an extensive list of serial numbers in a bid to object to these voters, alleging that they are dead or were out of the jurisdiction on March 2. This was meant to buttress allegations votes were fraudulently cast using their identities.
The CARICOM Scrutineer team, in its report, called this exercise a “bizarre… fishing expedition”.
But Boyer pointed to the GECOM Secretariat opting to accommodate that expedition by telling the coalition agents whether the individuals in question appear to have voted, though requests by observers and party agents to verify whether the serial numbers were indeed ticked on the Official List were met with rejection.
He said “On the basis of the information GECOM staff provided about marked electors, the APNU+AFC agents would then tell GECOM that they objected to the voters marked on the grounds that they impersonated the dead or were out of the jurisdiction.”
Deygoo-Boyer spoke of cases where other party agents would object to the unsubstantiated allegations made by coalition agents, adding that the GECOM staff would refuse to note their objections. Boyer noted that the CEO omitted to note the objections of the other political party agents in his report, and went on to treat them as though they are credible, claiming that GECOM consulted with relevant authorities and found the allegations to be true.
The GECOM Chair has said that GECOM cannot convert itself into a court of law to investigate and pronounce on the validity of the elections. Boyer agrees.
However, he added that “even if it were within the scope of the [recount] exercise, it failed to meet basic standards of transparency in allowing persons against whom claims were being made the opportunity to know and respond, as would be afforded in a basic claims and objections process.”
Also apparent to the Observer is that in Lowenfield’s report, as he sought to revise the recount results in a way that would give the coalition a commanding majority, “CEO does not apply the best practice approach in elections, to calculate the percentage of votes that are alleged to be illegally cast as a percent of the entire votes at the ballot box, district, or national level, and provide an analysis of whether these could have changed the overall result of the election.”
What Lowenfield did instead was to employ, according to Boyer, an approach pedaled by the coalition, to remove entirely all valid votes in what Lowenfield calls the “boxes impacted”, thereby failing to address the distinction between administrative errors and alleged fraud. Boyer posited that the purported failure of GECOM to address those errors speaks to more the quality of administration than it does the elections’ credibility.
On top of that, the CEO’s revision seeks to disenfranchise a majority (269,619) of the 460,352 electors who validly cast their ballots on March 2.
“We fear,” Boyer stated, “that Mr. Lowenfield has now three times shown a partial disposition to one list of the candidates in the execution of his duties. The first is his repeated failure as Mr. Mingo’s supervisor to direct him to use the Statements of Poll (SOPs) to tabulate the District 4 results. The second is his inclusion of Mr. Mingo’s fraudulent declaration in his summary report of the elections to the Commission when he had himself checked in the presence of witnesses and seen that the tabulation of two ballot boxes did not correspond with the SOPs; and he must have had access to GECOM’s SOPs to know that the tabulation did not reflect the numbers recorded on those SOPs. Now we have Mr. Lowenfield’s analysis that treats observation reports in a manner that is outside the scope of his remit, unsubstantiated and biased, but manages to cast doubt on the credibility of the elections.”

 

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