Dear Editor,
In a letter to Stabroek News on 26th April, 2022, Vishnu Bisram, after listing the various attempts to rig our elections from 1968 onwards and identifying the historical context in which these attempts were made, with which I have little or no disagreement, asks the question “why the effort was made to rig the outcome (the March 2020 elections) after the election rather than on Election day or before the count or during the initial count”? It’s an excellent question.
It is highly probable that the governing APNU+AFC Coalition were confident that they would win the elections with GECOM, under the Chairmanship of Justice (Ret’d) James Patterson, along with the representation of its 3 Commissioners, Alexander, Corbin and Trotman.
The No Confidence Motion in December 2018 upset the applecart which required then President David Granger, under the law, to hold elections within 3 months of the motion. Had he done so, the APNU+AFC might well have won the elections but, instead, APNU+AFC made the mistake of deliberate delay, which is now history, resulting in GECOM coming under the Chairmanship of Justice (Ret’d) Claudette Singh.
There was virtually no possibility of the March 2020 elections being manipulated or rigged under the massive presence of Domestic and International Observers. Indeed, the elections were universally recognized as free and fair, even by David Granger, at the time.
Unfortunately for the APNU+AFC, when the results of the Statements of Poll (SOPs) had become publicly known from the Statements of Poll being declared at the polling stations and in the possession of the contesting parties on the evening of 2nd March, 2020, even though the District 4 count had not yet been formally tabulated, the PNCR knew that they had lost the elections.
It is clear from what subsequently transpired, that the attempts by Lowenfield and Mingo to first delay and then rig the District 4 results, were an act of desperation, exposed only because of the continuing presence of the Observer teams from the Private Sector Commission (of which I was a member), the international community and the resident diplomatic community.
I witnessed firsthand, the first attempt by Mingo at the GECOM office at Ashmin’s building, to announce an entirely false result without even completing the District 4 count, in the presence of the entire Observer organizations.
In spite of a ruling of the Chief Justice ordering the Chairman of GECOM to continue the District 4 count using the SOPs, we know that Lowenfield and Mingo persisted in presenting a fraudulent count which finally led to a Recount confirming that the PPP/C had won the elections.
As an Observer of these events, the former Prime Minister, Bruce Golding, as Bisram reminds us, declared that he had never seen such a transparent attempt to rig an election and, before that, as an Accredited Observer for the Private Sector Commission at a PSC Press Conference, I said that “in all my life and career, in and out of politics in this country, I have never seen such a bare faced, ugly and deliberate attempt to rig an elections”.
It should be borne in mind that even during the entire Recount, the false declaration of the District 4 count by Keith Lowenfield had been held “in abeyance” by Chairman Singh. Had it been recognized by GECOM, David Granger would have been sworn in as the President of a rigged election count. We came that close and, even after the Recount, had it not been for a successful Appeal to the Carib-bean Court of Justice (CCJ) and the unrelenting pressure of the international community, David Granger, again, would have been sworn in as President from a rigged election count. I hope that I have provided some answer to the question posed by Vishnu Bisram.
Yours sincerely,
Kit Nascimento
