Georgetown: In order for genuine talks of power-sharing to be held while moving the country forward, People’s Progressive Party (PPP) General Secretary Bharrat Jagdeo urged President David Granger and the A Partnership for National Unity/Alliance For Change’s (APNU/AFC) to accept the defeat gracefully.
During a virtual broadcast press conference, Jagdeo said the many APNU/AFC counting agents have made unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud without any evidence in order to slow down the process which will ultimately prove that the PPP won the March 2, 2020 elections.
He said so many objections were made by APNU/AFC until the party even objected to their own votes at Belladrum, West Coast Berbice (WCB), to show the lengths the party is going to discredit the elections they previously praised as free and fair when they declared they won the elections.
“They talk about joint Government. You think anyone would want to sit in the same Government with some of these guys who are making such patently false allegations and throwing the country in turmoil. There’s no gracefulness about this group in defeat. No acceptance that they’ve lost the elections,” Jagdeo said.
He continued: “they just want to start trouble, to secure a place in a future Government. They must be misreading the PPP by now. We can’t be bullied. We can be reasoned into issues but we can’t be bullied into anything. We won’t stand for that. Your history would testify to that.”
Meanwhile, Jagdeo said GECOM must not pander to APNU.
“We see them doing a great deal of bending over backwards to accommodate APNU even when the issues have been clarified,” Jagdeo urged.
Others, he said, are allegations of voter fraud that come without a shred of evidence. Jagdeo noted that in the same vein that GECOM gives credence to APNU/AFC allegations of dead and migrated people having voted, GECOM should also be interested in disproving Region Four Returning Officer Clairmont Mingo’s fraudulent declaration. Instead, his controversial declaration remains in abeyance.
“The same way they are turning a blind eye, that is what we find duplicitous about GECOM. They’re turning a blind eye to an illegality that could easily be proven by documents they have in their possession, which are the SoPs and Mingo’s declarations.”
“They’re refusing to make that public, yet they’re giving minor credence to all these wild, unverified allegations from APNU,” Jagdeo said.
Further, he warned the agents making the allegations that it is a crime to make false claims of voter fraud. He said that knowingly making false accusions and the release of death certificates release without permission are criminal offences.
He also revealed that there are independent lawyers who are planning to pursue charges against such persons and noted that it will not be the political masterminds who face the charges, but the agents.
“They’re sending their agents to the counting places and it is those agents, when the Government changes, who’re going to get into trouble. Because a group of independent lawyers contacted me.”
“And they said they’re forming a team to file against all those people [who make false allegations]. And it is the ones whose names are in the counting station making false allegations who will be charged. Because there are criminal offences for what they’re doing.”
The recount of ballots cast during the March 2 General and Regional Elections has been punctuated daily with allegations of votes being cast in the name of dead persons, or persons said to have migrated.
There have been numerous reported instances of ballots being unstamped or unclear, or even a party questioning the legitimacy of its own votes; but a decision by the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) in regard to how to treat with those allegations has, in fact, not been made, though the matter has been discussed at that level.
GECOM Chairperson, Retired Justice Claudette Singh, in a public statement on Thursday, reaffirmed emphatically: “While I continue to monitor the trends based on the allegations in the Observation Reports, I am of the view that ‘he who asserts must prove’.”
Essentially, this was a call for those party agents making objections at the counting stations to “prove” that their claims are, in fact, valid.
GECOM Commissioner Sase Gunraj has, meanwhile, advocated during the course of the recount that it is not within the remit of GECOM to investigate the allegations being made during the recount exercise, but rather those should be addressed separately.
The public discourse over the observations comes in the wake of a confession by APNU/AFC tabulation agent Ganesh Mahipaul that the party did not, in fact, have any evidence to support its claims that persons allegedly out of the country voted on Election Day.
Mahipaul told reporters recently that the objections were being made based on “hearsay” provided by his party agents who are conducting fieldwork.
Additionally, the APNU/AFC agent, in claiming to have evidence to support the claim that a dead person had been reflected as voted, supplied the State media with a death certificate which was reproduced in the Guyana Chronicle.
Neither Mahipaul nor anyone from APNU/AFC has provided evidence that a ballot was supplied to anyone for the identified name and serial number, in light of the Chairperson’s position that “he who asserts must prove.”
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