By hook or crook!

May 31, 2022 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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Kaieteur News – No election is ever going to satisfy the riggers and their sidekicks, including those who shamelessly support their discredited narratives. In the eyes of the PNC/R, no election, other than that which hands it victory is ever going to be credible.
It does not matter what systems are employed. You can have the most flawless of procedures and an incident-free elections, but so long as the PNC/R does not win it will claim there was fraud.
No system will ever be good enough for the PNC/R so long as it does not win the election. No system will ever be fool-proof enough to avoid being put under the microscope by the PNC/R.
The PNC/R has a plaster for every electoral sore, real or imagined. It is therefore an exercise in futility to attempt to implement further electoral safeguards.
When it lost the 1992 elections, some of its talk show hosts claimed that the computers at GECOM’s headquarters were connected to computers at Freedom House and there was contamination of the data. It did not dawn on them that the results were being manually tabulated.
In 1997, the PNC agreed to the use of a voter identification card to guard against fraud. Each voter was required to present this voter identification when voting and to surrender it upon completion.
After the PNC lost comprehensively, it went to court to challenge the constitutionality of the very Voter ID Card which it had agreed to. Indeed, the court vitiated the elections on the grounds that the use of the CARD was unconstitutional.
The PNC/R will not accept any result other than a victory for itself. That has been the track-record of the PNC/R.
When the idea of voting machines was touted by the Canadians, both the PNC/R and the PPP/C rejected it, even for local government elections where the stakes are not as high as in general elections.
A former Chairman of the Guyana Elections Commission had even suggested electronic voting and electronic registration. But this did not find favour with the Commission.
Now there is the proposal to introduce biometrics into the voting process. For those who are not aware, there is a system of biometrics already in place. At each polling station there is a folio containing biometric details, including photographs, of every voter who is eligible to vote at that location.
A biometric system verification system is already in place. And the PNC/R had agreed to that system.
But no system is ever going to satisfy the PNC/R. Ever since the 1992 polls, the PNC/R has only twice accepted the democratic will of the people: the first was in 2006 when it was defeated comprehensively; and the second was in 2015 when it was part of a Coalition that won the elections.
In 2015, one leading light of the PNC/R bragged that the APNU+AFC coalition was able to stop the PPP/C from rigging the elections because it deployed polling agents at every polling station to guard against fraud. In 2020, it also employed polling agents at every polling station. Yet it wants to claim that massive irregularities were committed in the presence of these polling agents.
Nothing other than a PNC/R victory will ever be good enough. The PNC/R is not interested in free and fair elections; it wants a system that would rubberstamp its victory.
It now wants additional biometrics, including the use of fingerprints for voting. This is a recipe for electoral riots.
What happens when a registered voter turns up to vote and the fingerprint recognition machine does not recognise his or her fingerprint? This could create mass disenfranchisement.
At present a number of local companies have fingerprint recognition machines which are used to record their staff’s attendance at work. But on a daily basis, some employees have to make one, two, or three attempts before the machines recognise their fingerprints. In some instances, the machines refuse to identify a staff member who then has to resort to clearance from higher authorities.
Is this the sort of system which the PNC/R wishes to impose on Guyana – a system which will lead to disruptions and cast further suspicions on the electoral system? Or is this yet another excuse which the PNC/R has concocted to further its discredited narrative about gross irregularities at the polls?
The PNC/R finds itself having to invent proposals to justify its narrative. It has climbed on platforms to peddle the narrative that the 2020 polls were marred by massive irregularities. Unable to prove these irregularities, the PNC/R can only sustain the narrative by throwing shade at the existing electoral process.
Nothing will please the PNC/R. Free and fair elections are an anathema to the authoritarian instincts of the party.
The PNC/R will only be satisfied by a system which grants it victory. By hook or by crook!
(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

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