The Georgetown Chamber of Commerce and Industry (GCCI) has expressed its complete lack of faith in the embattled Chief Election Officer (CEO), Keith Lowenfield, to execute his mandate and describes his reports as prejudiced and not credible.
In a letter dated June 15 from the GCCI president, Nicholas Boyer to the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) chair, Justice (Ret’d) Claudette Singh, and seen by this newspaper, several concerns were addressed, chief of which was the conduct of Lowenfield.
The letter began by congratulating the Chair on an exercise that was “well conducted and produced a true and accurate vote count, representing the will of the electorate.” However, as accredited observers, the GCCI drew to the Chair’s attention, a number of “unfair and irregular actions” undertaken by GECOM Secretariat that it felt were completely outside of the scope of the Recount Order.
It proffered the view that these may have been incidental, but having seen the way in which the CEO has elevated aspects of the Observation Reports into his report and representations to the Commission, the Chamber wished to “… formally record that in our assessment, the CEO’s report on the Observation Reports is prejudiced and represents a non-credible aspect of the recount exercise.”
In its revisiting of the recount exercise, the Chamber noted that at the beginning of the recount for each ballot box, APNU+AFC agents would call out a large list of serial numbers and object to those voters on the grounds that they impersonated the dead or were out of the jurisdiction. “They sometimes called serial numbers not related to the ballot box. GECOM staff would then tell the APNU+AFC agents whether any of those serial numbers were marked as voted on the Official List of Electors (OLE).” According to the GCCI, no one was afforded the opportunity to witness the OLEs and thus verify whether the information being given by GECOM staff was authentic. The APNU+AFC agents, it claims, never asked and that requests by other party agents were denied.
In continuing to describe the events as the Chamber’s agents saw it, it was stated that on the basis of the information GECOM staff provided about marked electors, the APNU+AFC agents would then tell GECOM that they objected to the voters marked on the grounds that they impersonated the dead or were out of the jurisdiction. Other parties, the letter claims, objected to this forming part of the record of Observation Reports because, aside from the fact that GECOM staff “appeared to have assisted” APNU+AFC with providing particulars of electors using OLEs, APNU+AFC agents provided no evidence.
Still, the Chamber says, GECOM staff went ahead and recorded the objections and reasons for these objections in the Observation Reports. It also noted that other party agents formally objected to the APNU+AFC’s objections, but GECOM staff refused to record those objections in the Observation Reports. “This practice continued throughout the recount process.”
Turning its attention to the CEO, GCCI avers that in his treatment of the APNU+AFC objections in his report to the Commission on the recount, the CEO omitted to mention that all political party agents present objected to the APNU+AFC objections. It accused Lowenfield of treating the APNU+AFC objections as credible and making the claim that through an “opaque” bilateral process with relevant authorities, GECOM was able to receive information confirming these allegations to be true. Others, it added, have commented that this action is outside of GECOM’s authority and the analysis provided by the CEO was completely outside of the scope of the Recount Order. “We agree but wish to draw your attention to the fact that even if it were within the scope of the exercise, it failed to meet basic standards of transparency in allowing persons against whom claims were being made the opportunity to know and respond, as would be afforded in a basic claims and objections process. Therefore, there is no credibility whatsoever at any level of this exercise or to anything for which the information was used.”
Public perception
Concern was expressed, not only about the credibility of this process but also what the CEO’s actions mean for public perception of the integrity of the March 2, General Regional Elections. The Chamber opined that the CEO appears to have used the authority that comes with the post of Chief Election Officer to take unverified information and legitimise it to both the Commission, and the public. This, it says, conforms “wholly” with a public campaign that the APNU+AFC has been waging to discredit the entire March 2, elections now that the recount exercise has proven beyond doubt that GECOM did indeed declare fraudulent District 4 elections results. “We need not remind you that these results would have incorrectly given the APNU-AFC party majority seats in Parliament and the Presidency. It is extraordinary that Mr. Lowenfield has wandered into discussing the credibility of the elections in his report but has not made a single mention of this glaring find.”
The GCCI sees it as “remarkable” that as a senior election official, the CEO does not apply the best practice approach in elections, which is to calculate the percentage of votes that are alleged to be illegally cast as a percent of the entire votes at the ballot box, district, or national level, and provide an analysis of whether these could have changed the overall result of the election. Instead, it contends, that Lowenfield employed a “novel” approach that was being widely peddled by the APNU+AFC party of “boxes impacted”. He also makes no real effort to address what are administrative errors versus alleged fraud in his “boxes impacted” analysis.
As an example, the Chamber drew attention to the Representation of the People Act which requires that ballots cast and ballots rejected are to be sealed in a ballot box. It is GECOM’s administrative manual that asks for other documents, including Official Lists of Electors, to be sealed in boxes and therefore the failure of Presiding Officers to have been consistent and the purported failure of GECOM to find large numbers of document exposes more the quality of administration than it does the credibility of the elections. However, Lowenfield chose to focus on the latter.
The Chamber expressed the fear that on three occasions now, the CEO has shown a partial disposition to one list of the candidates in the execution of his duties. The first, it says, is his repeated failure as the supervisor of the Returning Officer of Electoral District 4, Clairmont Mingo, to direct him to use the Statements of Poll (SOPs) to tabulate the District 4 results. The second is his inclusion of Mingo’s fraudulent declaration in his summary report of the elections to the Commission when he had himself checked in the presence of witnesses and seen that the tabulation of two ballot boxes did not correspond with the SOPs. In this the Chamber contends that he must have had access to GECOM’s SOPs to know that the tabulation did not reflect the numbers recorded on those SOPs.
As far as the Chamber is concerned, Lowenfield’s analysis treats observation reports in a manner that is outside the scope of his remit, “unsubstantiated and biased”, but manages to cast doubt on the credibility of the elections.
In conclusion the letter states, “We have lost confidence entirely in Mr. Lowenfield as the CEO and manager of the Secretariat of GECOM. We believe that it would be keeping with the purpose of free and fair elections to exclude the prejudicial report on Observation Reports submitted by the CEO to the Commission in your consideration of the results of the election.”
