I write in reference to Mr. Vincent Alexander’s letter in the Kaieteur News edition of November 3, 2024, with the caption “Nandlall’s insistence that GECOM’s systems are perfect is baseless”. According to him, “the Chief Immigration Officer verified that the names extracted from the list of names of persons who cast votes, which was sent for verification, consisted, to the extent of approximately 75% of names of persons who were out of the country on elections day’ day”.
Mr. Alexander goes onto to state that “…The Chairperson of the Elections Commission on May 20, 2020 wrote to the Commissioner of Police requesting the verification of the presence or absence of named persons in the country on elections day. On May 27, 2020 the Commissioner responded verifying that of the 307 names submitted for verification 172 were out of the country and 35 were in the country. This is but one sample. The truth be told: the Chairperson of GECOM had not brought to the attention of the CARICOM Observer Mission the existence of the aforementioned information, although they were in the country at the time of its receipt”.
If I am not mistaken, I believe Mr. Alexander is a trained attorney, therefore, he ought to know that he cannot present unsubstantiated claims as “incontrovertible evidence”.It is not!Yet, he has evidently prostituted the term “evidence”, vis-à-vis, his loose usage of the word. For him to make such claims and, if at all he is to be believed, it means that he would have been privy/aware of the existence of same, he has seen and verified the evidence, thus; he should be in possession of the evidence to present to the general public. But one wonders why after more than four years have elapsed, that he has failed to make those “evidence” that he claims exist, to the public.
If one were to treat Mr. Alexander’s ludicrousness with an iota of seriousness, then anyone could say anything for that matter, publicly and call that evidence. Unfortunately, no sensible person would accept that.
On the contrary, when the PPP/C claimed that they won the 2020 national election, they presented the evidence to the world at large by making their copies of the Statements of Polls (SOPs) public.Moreover, the national recount confirmed that the PPP/C had indeed won the 2020 election, which means the Statements of Recount (SOR) corresponded to the SOPs. This is evidence!
With respect to Mr. Alexander’s claims of dead votes and migrants voting who were not in the country, this is what the report of the CARICOM Observer Team had to say: “The team viewed much of the exercise as a fishing expedition designed to gather data for a possible election petition and which resulted in considerable time being wasted during the recount. Furthermore, the net was cast extremely wide in the hope of at least making a small catch and at times the anticipated harvest ended in slim pickings. In only one observed recount of a ballot box was the number of queried serials confirmed as having voted in fact significant relative to the queried number. The Team did not view the objections raised by the APNU/AFC as materially relevant to the recount of the ballot…Moreover, we simply have no evidence as to who were the ultimate beneficiaries of the alleged “ghost voting” and voter impersonation” (Pg. 8). This is evidence!
The CARICOM Observer Mission concluded that “the national recount process then, despite some of its administrative failings, despite some of the minor flaws, is not an indictment of the 2020 polls and the team categorically rejects the concerted public efforts to discredit the 2020 poll up to the disastrous Region 4 tabulation…nothing that we witnessed, warrants a challenge to the inescapable conclusion that the recount results are acceptable and should constitute the basis of the declaration of the results of the March 02, 2020, elections”(CARICOM Observer Mission Report, 2020; Pg 10). This is evidence!
Further, on the 13th of September 2022, an International Commission of Inquiry (COI) into the General and Regional Elections of Guyana on March 02, 2020, was sworn in by the President of the Cooperative Republic of Guyana, Dr. Mohamed Irfaan Ali. The COI completed its work in 2023, and a report was handed over to the President in April 2023. In summary, the findings of the report of the COI revealed that “there were, in fact, shockingly brazen attempts by the [CEO], [DCEO] and Returning Officer, Clairmont Mingo to derail and corrupt the statutorily prescribed procedure for the counting, ascertaining and tabulation of the votes of the March 2, 2020, election as well as the declaration of the results of that election, and that they did so to put unvarnished language of the ordinary man for the purpose of stealing the election.” Again, this is incontrovertible verifiable evidence!
It might be interesting to note that in 2020, this author was an employee of the Private Sector Commission (PSC), the Manager and Economic Analyst for the PSC at that time. The PSCcoordinated the largest local observer mission, covering nearly 100% of the election and more so the national recount. This author was the coordinator for that mission and held the responsibility for analyzing all of the observer reports, together with our own independent tabulation of the result using the SOPs.
With that in mind, presented hereunder is the executive summary of a report prepared originally by this author, which was a “review of the report on the National Recount of the General and Regional Elections by GECOM’s Chief Elections Officer, Keith Lowenfield”.
The findings contained therein were derived from having conducted a thorough examination and analysis of the Observation reports for all regions, which werein stark contrast to the number of anomalies reported by the Chief Elections Officer for all ten districts. To this end, having reviewed the report prepared by Chief Elections Officer, it appears that he did not scrutinize to verify for himself, the observation reports – given that the reported anomalies mirror those allegations submitted by the APNU+AFC. It is important to note that when the agents were calling out hundreds of random numbers, in many instances only two or three were confirmed to have been ticked and according to the instructions given by the Commission and the gazetted order, only those that were confirmed ticked ought to have been taken into consideration as alleged anomalies. Clearly, the report submitted did not reflect this, which can be verified from examining the observer reports and conducting an exercise of random sampling. Interestingly, where the Chief Elections Officer reported exactly which party’s votes were affected by the anomalies, it is important to point out that it is almost impossible to ascertain who voted for which party since the ballots cast are secret ballots. As such, there is absolutely no way in which one can ascertain which political party these alleged illegal voters―voted for. The Chief Elections Officer, in view of this aspect contained in his report, ought to explain the methodology through which those numbers were derived to determine which party votes were affected and justification of same which is absent from the report.
Further, it is noteworthy to mention that the alleged ticks confirmed by the GECOM supervisor of the recount, was not done in a transparent manner, where both political party agents and local observers were denied, when asked to verify this claim. Therefore, it can be concluded that such allegations lack merit and credibility. Further, it is not unusual for the OLEs in the possession of each party agents and that of the GECOM officials would have mismatch in ticks which would be tantamount to genuine human error as this is merely an administrative exercise. For example, if one of the agents were preoccupied in other administrative tasks and thus forgot to indicate on his/her list a ‘tick to confirm. This will naturally result in a mismatch. Moreover, indicating a ‘tick’ on the list is not a strong controlled mechanism that is verifiable and can thus withstand the highest degree of scrutiny, simply because in the administrative procedure, no one verifies the ticks, and no one reconciles the ticks on the list with the total votes / ballots cast. Additionally, the indication by way of “ticks” on the list does not appear to have been catered for in the electoral law and, therefore, the CEO cannot use this, which was the substantive basis employed by the APNU+AFC agents at the recount in their attempt to invalidate valid votes cast on elections day. It is now public knowledge that these allegations are unverified, and none have been so far proven to
Summary of Anomalies
Lastly, the total number of alleged migrated voters was 2,603, which the APNU+AFC claimed that immigration data confirmed that these persons were not in the country on the day of the election. However, by extrapolating from the arrivals and departures data, it was found that in 2019, the total number of arrivals were reportedly 357,362 and total departure of 322,294, giving rise to a net arrival of 35,068.And in the first quarter of 2020, the total number of arrivals were 62,121 and total departures were 60,443, giving rise to a net arrival of 1,678. Consequently, it is reasonable to presume that some these persons might have remained in Guyana for the 2020 election, and if the number of alleged votes by persons who migrated of 2,603 was correct, then based on the official immigration data for the year 2019 and first quarter of 2020, those persons might have indeed been in the country on the day of the election.
With all of the foregoing in mind, I end by reaffirming my position that if Mr. Vincent Alexander has any evidence to the contrary, then please do not keep the country in the dark.Publish the “incontrovertible evidence”! Save and except if his evidence is safely secured with the APNU+AFC SOPs.