Dear Editor,
Writing on Guyana’s Elections 2020, Associated Press accredited journalist Bert Wilkinson made the bizarre assertion that “Following a recount of some districts, Granger’s party was almost 160,000 votes behind the main opposition People’s Progressive Party”. The article entitled ‘Guy-ana in crisis due to dispute over election fairness’ was carried in the Washington Post on the 16th June and is riddled with similar inaccuracies from start to finish, so much so that one comes away with a new understanding of the Ameri-can news phenomenon described as ‘alternate facts’.
The certified tabulation of a recount of every single ballot cast in the election showed the People’s Progressive Party won by 15,416 votes. Wilkinson falsely contends that “the head of the Elections Commission argued that the March 2 vote was badly flawed and should be thrown out” while in fact, the head of the Elections Commission Chairman Claudette Singh has directed the Chief Election Officer Keith Lowenfield to prepare the final report for the March 2nd general elections using the data from the recount of votes.
Wilkinson also describes the recount as an “audit” which “found so many irregularities that the vote in the small South American nation can’t be described as “credible.”. There was no audit as that would have to be done by an external agency (The Elections Commission cannot audit itself) and what has been described as “irregularities” by Lowenfield were described by The CARICOM high-level team which served as the scrutineer for the national vote recount as “a fishing expedition”.
“The Team viewed much of the exercise as a fishing expedition designed to gather data for a possible election petition and which resulted in considerable time being wasted during the recount,” and “Further, the net was cast extremely wide in the hope of at least making a small catch and at times the anticipated harvest ended in slim pickings.” The team also noted that “the numerous requests for information on serial numbers were so bizarre, that on one observed occasion, an APNU+AFC agent was prepared to query serial numbers on the Official List of Elections in a Work Station where no one had voted.” The CARICOM Team concluded that it did not view the objections raised by APNU+AFC as materially relevant to the recount of the ballot.
Wilkinson mentions two of the observer missions, the Organiza-tion of American States and the Carter Center in his article as part of “international pressure” to certify the electoral victory by the People’s Progressive Party; Wilkinson makes no mention of the local observer missions who have all made the same call; The Private Sector Commission, the George-town Chamber of Commerce and the American Chamber of Com-merce Guyana; Wilkinson also omits the European Union and Commonwealth Observer Missions who have all been pellucid in their reports that the elections are credible and were only marred by the attempted fraud of one official, Mr. Mingo, the Returning Officer for District Four, the country’s most populous area.
Guyana is not in the midst of a ‘crisis due to dispute over election fairness’; Guyana is in a crisis manufactured by a small group of people willing to go to any length to subvert the will of the people as expressed on ballots. Anyone seeking the truth about Guyana’s elections 2020 can read the reports prepared by any/all of the Observer missions, international or local; they do not differ in their facts and findings.
Yours faithfully,
Robin Singh