Saying that the APNU+AFC coalition has been deliberately fooling its supporters with grossly exaggerated claims of electoral fraud, former minister Dominic Gaskin yesterday urged the incumbent to be honest and accepts its defeat and work towards regaining the swing voters it will need to win any future elections.
“The claims of fraud were grossly exaggerated and, unfortunately, designed to fool party supporters, who had placed their faith in the coalition, into believing that there was actual evidence of serious elections rigging by the PPP-C,” Gaskin, who is the son-in-law of incumbent president David Granger, wrote in a Facebook post, where he voiced his fear that based on its conduct thus far, APNU+AFC has no intention of giving up the control of government.
“Five years after winning an election and gaining office with a fair amount of goodwill, the coalition is saying to the people who put us there, the equivalent of “unless and until WE are satisfied beyond a shadow of a doubt that “more votes are cast” in favour of another party in an election that WE deem credible, WE ain going nowhere”. That condition will never be satisfied,” he added.
However, Gaskin reminded that no one elected APNU+AFC to remain in office forever.
“There is no reasonable basis on which you can claim to have won more votes than the PPP-C in these elections. Level with your supporters and start directing your energies towards becoming a credible opposition party in time for 2025. Above all, try to regain the trust of the swing voter. You will never win another election without their support,” he urged.
Gaskin in March had broken his silence and rejected the controversial vote count that was initially declared by Region Four Returning Officer (RO) Clairmont Mingo in favour of APNU+AFC, while saying that there needed to be a full investigation to determine if there was wrongdoing by Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) officials in connection with the integrity of Statements of Poll (SOPs) or the tabulation of results from the March 2 elections.
In his post yesterday, he said he could no longer wait quietly and politely while the country gets hijacked, ridiculed and torn apart before noting that it was never a valid assumption that having won the 2015 elections by a slim majority, the APNU+AFC coalition would easily win the 2020 elections.
“It was always going to be a tough fight. I’m no political analyst, but it’s fairly obvious that the swing vote has determined the results of the last three General elections in Guyana. Having failed at the polls for over two decades, the PNC never commanded the electoral strength to win an election on its own, and was only able to squeeze past the PPP-C because of its alliance with the AFC. Unlike the PPP-C and the PNC, the AFC does not have a stranglehold on any section of the electorate. Instead it relies on a swing vote that is more discerning and less forgiving than the constituents of the two larger parties. The question, therefore, is whether it is possible that a sizeable portion of the swing voters, who supported the AFC in 2015, abandoned the Coalition in 2020 and voted instead for the PPP and the new parties. To me this is entirely possible and therefore the results of the 2020 election, while not desirable, are certainly plausible,” Gaskin, who is an AFC member, reasoned.
He said that having paid close attention to the tabulated results of the 2020 elections, and having done his own projections, he knew by March 4th that a coalition victory, while still possible, was unlikely. “I was aware that we had lost the East Coast Demerara sub-district by several thousand votes and the East Bank Demerara sub-district by close to one thousand votes. At the time, the Returning Officer for District Four, Mr. Clairmont Mingo, had completed the tabulations for the Georgetown area, showing the Coalition ahead in District Four by nearly forty thousand votes. This was clearly not enough to close the more than fifty thousand vote lead that the PPP-C had gained in the other nine electoral districts, which had already been tabulated. I was not particularly concerned when I heard the first reports of a “spreadsheet” being used by Mr. Mingo. However, when I heard the actual numbers that he finally declared, I became deeply suspicious. There was no way his numbers could have been correct,” he said.
However, Gaskin said that to his disappointment, the leaderships of both APNU and the AFC claimed that Mingo’s numbers were consistent with the coalition’s own SOPs and insisted that a final declaration be made on the basis of those numbers, and then supported the court action to prevent a recount.
He noted that the recount went ahead and the results showed clearly that Mingo’s numbers could not have been based on actual SOPs. “At the very least APNU+AFC’s supporters deserve an explanation from its leadership as to the basis on which they claimed to have won the election prior to the recount,” he added.
APNU+AFC has been unwilling to release its SOPs for scrutiny although it has consistently maintained that they prove the coalition won the elections.
Gaskin said the nation put its faith in the CARICOM observer team, and held its breath for the duration of the recount, while being treated to a daily menu of “Breaking News,” of more and more discoveries of “Massive Fraud,” and “Systemic Rigging”.
“In the end the CARICOM team delivered its report, endorsing the elections and the results of the recount, only to have it rejected by the Coalition in favour of a devious piece of reasoning by Chief Elections Officer Keith Lowenfield. To her credit, the Chairperson of the Guyana Elections Commission then issued very clear instructions to Mr. Lowenfield to submit a report for consideration by the Commission using the results of the recount. Needless to say, another move to the court has been made and this report, from which a final declaration should have resulted, will now have to await the outcome of yet another tedious challenge,” he said.
According to Gaskin, the claim that vast numbers of disciplined services ballots were deliberately not stamped, and therefore rejected, proved the falsehood of the APNU+AFC claims. “The so-called intermixing stations are known, and it is a fairly simple task, to sum up all the unstamped rejected ballots in those stations to support the allegation. This, however, was not done and the ominous suggestion was left to torment the minds of the men and women responsible for the defence and protection of our country and its citizens,” he said before adding that this led him to “a very uncomfortable conclusion” that “…APNU+AFC has no intention of relinquishing control of the government.”
