Georgetown: The A Partnership for National Unity/Alliance For Change (APNU/AFC) claims there was massive electoral fraud at the March 2 general and regional elections but is also maintaining that the party won the same elections.
“But make no mistake, the APNU+AFC has been and remains confident that we were successful at the poll. We, however, must stay focused on the validity of each vote which gives credibility to the process,” said the party’s Campaign Manager Joseph Harmon in a video on the party’s Facebook page Monday.
Underscoring that there was major electoral fraud that renders the results not credible, Harmon said “our investigations have revealed that as of May 22, the electoral theft and scheme is unravelling and 86,367 votes cannot be explained or accounted for. This directly goes to the credibility of these elections. These unaccounted votes are evidence of a fraudulent attempt to steal the elections, suppress the will of the majority of the Guyanese people who voted for the APNU/AFC.”
The Campaign Manager reiterated the long lists of persons it claims are either dead or migrated but are marked off as having voted and called on the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) to say how and when they will resolve these issues.
Harmon said APNU/AFC would insist that all Disciplined Services votes are counted.
“It was clear for all to see that the overwhelming majority of the Disciplined Services personnel that they were in support of the APNU/AFC and so it would appear to me a calculated effort to ensure that those votes which they knew were going to come our way that they were deemed invalid,” Harmon said.
Recently, Chairman of A New and United Guyana (ANUG), Attorney-at-Law Timothy Jonas said during the recount what is being uncovered thus far is that the Statements of Polls (SOPs) are in fact matching the Statements of Recount (SoR), and “the only variable that is coming out is Mr Mingo’s declaration.”
“I know that a lot of spin doctors have been spinning (conflicting) issues and confusing things, but there is a very simple truth to this thing: so far, the only anomalies that have come up have come up in Region Four,” Jonas declared citing Mingo’s declarations.
The ANUG Chairman adamantly held to the position that the only fraud that occurred during the electoral process was what had taken place at the Ashmin’s Building on High Street, and then again at the GECOM Headquarters, with both incidents involving Mingo “when he read from his spreadsheet the numbers which did not reflect the numbers which existed on the SOPs for those places of poll. That is the only variable.”
Taking this into consideration, the attorney observed that at the time the original declaration had been given, “and Mr Mingo read his report, APNU said, ‘We won these elections, and we are satisfied with how counting of these ballots was done’.”
Reminding that the recount exercise was just an activity that is ascertaining the ballots cast, he said it would mean that “if there were dead people putting X’s on the ballots in the first place, is those same ballots we counting that got the dead people X’s; the same ballot we are now counting that APNU was happy to accept a victory (from) when Mingo counted them.”
He outlined that what is different this time around is that the count is being done transparently, and “APNU don’t want to see the results of that box, and APNU are now introducing questions which have nothing to do with how many pieces of paper were in the box.”
Jonas noted that what is being peddled in the public domain by the coalition as anomalies are in fact simply just the records of an APNU+AFC counting agent placing on record his/her belief that at a particular time or place, someone was out of the country, or dead.
He was adamant that there has not been a shred of evidence produced by the APNU/AFC to support the anomalies “presented to the Commission in this regard”.
Since the recount of the votes commenced on May 6, the coalition has been making numerous objections during the process citing electoral fraud but is yet to provide any evidence.
Harmon said there are 86,367 votes from 699 ballot boxes that need to be explained by GECOM.
Two months after claiming the party has won the elections it has refused to present the copies of the Statements of Poll it has in its possession to show how it won the elections.
To date, GECOM is yet to release the SOPs in its possession, despite a formal demand having been made by Opposition Commissioners.
Private criminal fraud charges have been filed against Peoples National Congress-Reform Chairperson, Volda Lawrence, and Returning Officer for Electoral District Four (Demerara-Mahaica), Clairmont Mingo whose signatures were affixed to the Region Four declaration.
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