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“Coalition could not win elections based on SoPs I saw”
Exclusive Interview with ex-AFC Minister, Dominic Gaskin:
Former Business Minister, Dominic Gaskin
It would have been an impossible feat for the A Partnership for National Unity + Alliance For Change (APNU+AFC) Coalition to emerge the victors of the March 2020 elections.
According to Alliance For Change (AFC) Executive member, Dominic Gaskin, the Statements of Poll (SOP) he saw proved otherwise.
Gaskin, in an exclusive, explosive interview on Kaieteur Radio’s Room 592 on Friday evening with hosts Dr. Yog Mahadeo and Senior Journalist, Leonard Gildarie, explained that he worked the evening of March 2, 2020 and collected a number of SOPs.
“We were not the custodians of the statement of polls (SoPs),” he said. “APNU took control of the statement of polls but we did do a tabulation; we did have a tabulation exercise where we would have photographed the statements of poll we would have collected and those were then sent to a centre where persons were engaged in recording those in a spreadsheet and doing a tabulation.”
Those were the very tabulations he had access to.
Asked whether it was possible for the party to have won the elections, Gaskin said: “No. Not based on what I saw.”
Gaskin was a former Business Minister, representing his party, the AFC.
His father-in-law was former President, David Granger.
He had taken to social media to express his unhappiness over the elections imbroglio which saw the countr
y in political limbo for five months since March 2 with the Coalition refusing to concede.
It sparked more than a dozen court cases, which saw visa sanctions announced by the US on coalition officials, including ministers.
“Based on all the information I would have had because, unfortunately my spreadsheet was not complete, but based on the information available to me, it would have been very difficult for us to have won the elections.”
The APNU+AFC, during the National Recount, had wanted the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) Chair, Justice Claudette Singh (ret’d) to declare the elections results using the fictitious numbers presented by District Four Returning Officer, Clairmont Mingo, in his March 13 declaration, putting on record that their SoPs “mostly matched” his numbers.
The People’s Progressive Party Civic (PPP/C) had then released their SoPs for public scrutiny and urged the coalition to do the same.
When asked whether the party would be releasing the SoPs in their possession for comparative analysis, it was Counting Agent and former Public Infrastructure Minister of the AFC, David Patterson, who had told the media during the exercise that the party had no intentions of doing this.
The APNU+AFC, however, continued to maintain that their SoPs matched that of Mingo’s even after the PPP/C was declared the winners of the election.
Gaskin, who has been vocal on the fraud committed by Mingo, said it would have been “impossible” for Mingo’s numbers to have been accurate.
And not only that, the former Business Minister said that of the information he has access to matched the numbers the PPP/C had in their SoPs.
“…A lot of the information available at the time, that I had access to had correlated with the PPP Statement of Polls that they had made public,” Gaskin said.
Several requests were made to GECOM for the release of the SoPs in their possession; however, the Commission did not act despite a similar request being put forward in 2011 that was accommodated.
Then Opposition Leader, David Granger had requested scanned copies of the SoPs from the November 2011 election and the same was handed to his party.
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