The opposition PPP says that even if the Chief Election Officer Keith Lowenfield subverts the electoral process by not submitting the correct results today for the March 2nd general elections, GECOM can act on its own.
The PPP was responding to a report in today’s edition of Stabroek News reporting remarks by AFC Leader Khemraj Ramjattan.
GECOM is to hold a meeting at 1 pm today at which Lowenfield should be submitting the final results showing a PPP/C victory. There are however concerns that Lowenfield may submit an alternative result derived from his arbitrary whittling away of votes that he has deemed invalid. Legal experts have said that he has no such atuthority.
A statement by the PPP follows:
The APNU+AFC continues their relentless attempts to prevent the accurate results of the 2nd March 2020 National and Regional elections from being declared. In their monumental efforts to pervert the will of the electorate, they continue to rely on Keith Lowenfield, the Chief Election Officer (CEO) of the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM), to carry out their illicit and undemocratic design.
The Chairperson of the Commission has already made it clear that the Commission has no jurisdiction to address the allegations of irregularities, stating that those are matters for the High Court. The CARICOM Observer team found these irregularities not to be “…sufficient nor substantial cause, to call the 2020 results into question.” As a result, the Chairperson rejected Mr. Lowenfield’s adjustments to the elections results based upon these irregularities and gave him very clear and precise instructions to prepare a report, required under Section 96 of the Representation of the People Act. It is public knowledge that the CEO has already tabulated the total valid votes cast and total valid votes cast for each political party from totals certified by his own Secretariat, during the national recount exercise. All he is required now to do, therefore, is to prepare the statutory form showing the allocation of seats for each political party under Section 99 of the Representation of the People Act and to signify that Dr. Irfaan Ali has been elected President of Guyana, under Article 177 of the Constitution. He can do nothing more and nothing less.
Any report prepared without using the totals of the valid votes cast, which he has already submitted to the Commission, would amount to a conspiracy to commit electoral fraud at Common Law, a most grievous offence, which can attract a severe a penalty as life imprisonment. Those who are in the conspiracy with him are exposed to the same criminal liabilities.
We note Khemraj Ramjattan’s outrageous comment in the Stabroek News that he believes that “certain legal technicalities can tip the electoral scale in the Coalition’s favour”. Coming from a lawyer, this is utterly disgraceful. It simply shows the level to which he is prepared to descend for political power.
We wish to remind Khemraj Ramjattan of the admonitions expressed by the Chief Justice of the Eastern Caribbean Court of Appeal:
“I do not think that the intention of the law is that an election should be won or lost on technicalities in Court, but rather the wish of the people, expressed through the ballot box, should prevail. The Court should put first and foremost, in my view, the intention of the electorate.” [Anthony Ribeiro v Kennedy Simmons 1979]
If after all that have transpired, there is still an attempt at this late stage to perpetrate electoral fraud, then it must be clear that Clairmont Mingo was not acting alone and was clearly carrying out the directions of personnel within the Secretariat and in the leadership of the APNU+AFC.
In the event that Mr. Lowenfield persist in subverting the elections results, by using erroneous figures in the preparation of the report, then the Commission has sufficiently wide powers under Article 162 of the Constitution, to declare the results of the elections, as produced by the national recount exercise.
