Georgetown: “They can raise all of these issues in an election petition if you have the evidence, provide it later to the court. That is what the law says,” General Secretary of the People’s Progressive Party (PPP), Bharrat Jagdeo said Thursday after he called on the incumbent APNU/AFC to file an elections petition to prove claims that dead people along with overseas-based Guyanese voted in the March 2, 2020 elections.
The coalition Thursday morning said that it is equipped with several death certificates, migration records and reliable information that it intends to use throughout the recount process.
AFC Executive Member, David Patterson told reporters outside the Conference Center that the Coalition hopes to use this information throughout the recount process so as to provide as much evidence as possible on how the voting process of March 02, 2020, was done.
“We have three other types of information with backing and supporting records,” he added.
Patterson said the Coalition has a team in the background that will be providing the necessary information to the party agents at the counting stations before ballot boxes are opened.
Meanwhile, Jagdeo said the coalition was behaving characteristically like a losing party and questioned the logic of wanting to use death certificates and immigration records to prove that they lost.
Jagdeo said at a minimum the coalition or the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) should release their Statements of Poll as boxes are counted. He highlighted that so far the recount of boxes in south Georgetown shows that the results are almost identical that those were recorded on the Statements of Poll.
He does not expect that trend to change unless the boxes are tampered. They are being guarded by police and watched by representatives of the political parties at the Arthur Chung Conference Centre, Liliendaal, Greater Georgetown where the recount is being conducted for the next 25 or more days.
Underscoring that the PPP won the March 2, 2020 general elections by 17,000 votes, Jagdeo accused the coalition of hatching a “plan to now to delay the process indefinitely so that they can hang on to power for a longer period.”
Jagdeo believes that APNU+AFC was also attempting to create sufficient doubts in the elections so that they could call for fresh elections. However, he said the coalition would not have challenged the results with the same bloated list if it had won.
APNU/ People’s National Congress Reform (PNCR) member, Attorney-at-Law, James Bond has already reasoned that the recount exercise was illegal and he would have preferred the previous declaration which showed the incumbent had won the election to be declared and anything after should be resolved through an election petition.
Further, Jagdeo said the motive of the APNU+AFC in the ongoing national vote recount exercise is becoming clear just two days into the activity.
He said a pattern of misinformation, delaying the recount process through deliberate obstruction and creating confusion seems to be part of the coalition’s grand plan.
The PPP, in cautioning citizens against misinformation, said the coalition seems determined to create enough doubt on the process with a grand plan to call for fresh elections.
The Opposition Leader said he shudders to think that President David Granger is a part of this “clumsiness” and said the President must now come out and say whether he is involved or not.
“Granger purports to be decent but he has allowed the APNU cabal, the rigging cabal to hijack everything.” Jagdeo said the coalition has also launched a nasty attack against the diplomatic community through its agents on social media.
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