Following a ruling on Monday by the Appeal Court, Chief Election Officer Keith Lowenfield yesterday submitted to the Guyana Elections Com-mission (GECOM) what he claims to be a report of the “valid and credible votes” cast at the March 2 polls.
These votes show a victory for the incumbent APNU+AFC after invalidating almost 25% of the votes cast at the March 2 polls. The report which is intended to lead to the declaration of a final result was yesterday put on hold by the Caribbean Court of Justice. (See other story on page 2.)
Lowenfield’s report would be seen as another outrageous attempt by a GECOM official to rig the elections in favour of APNU+AFC despite the official recount showing victory for the opposition PPP/C. Lowenfield’s re-port follows similar action by District Four Returning Officer, Clairmont Mingo to rig the vote for Demerara-Mahaica in favour of APNU+AFC.
It is unclear how Lowenfield determined the count but he has maintained that it is in accordance with Section 96 of the Representation of the People’s Act.
This section prescribes that the CEO shall, after calculating the total number of valid votes of electors which have been cast for each list of candidates, prepare a report manually and in electronic form for the Commission to declare and publish the election results.
His report, the submission of which was confirmed by PPP/C-nominated elections commissioner Bibi Shadick, is based on a total of 344,508 votes, which is significantly less than the 460,295 votes that were verified by the Secretariat during the national recount process.
In a letter attached to the report, Lowenfield states that he has “taken note of the guidance of the Court of Appeal in Eslyn David v CEO et al in the preparation of the report.”
The guidance referenced is the majority ruling issued on Monday that the words “more votes are cast” as per Article 177 (2) (b) of the Constitution of Guyana should be interpreted to mean “more valid votes are cast” in keeping with the definition of valid votes as outlined in Order 60 of 2020 (Recount Order).
Following its ruling, the court also granted a stay of its decision for three days.
Despite this stay, the CEO who previously refused to submit his report after being served with a notice of the Eslyn David case, compiled and submitted yesterday’s report.
In this report the CEO has inexplicably lowered the valid vote count in each Electoral District. In District One 3,406 votes have been invalidated by Lowenfield, 13,296 in District Two, 22,592 in District Three, 40,597 in District Four, 12,338 in District Five 4,827 in District Six, 6,226 in District Seven, 2,107 in District Eight, 8,265 in District Nine and 2,136 in District 10.
Across all Districts a total of 115,787 electors have had their votes invalidated by the unilateral decision of the CEO.
It would be unheard of in these parts for a Chief Election Officer to arbitrarily disenfranchise voters after they had cast their ballots and these had been counted and tallied as they were on March 2nd and during the recount.
The new submission also shows an APNU+AFC victory as it reports a total of 171,825 votes cast for the APNU+AFC compared to 166,343 for the PPP/C and 3,348 for a joinder list of new parties. As a result, with an electoral quota of 5,300, the coalition would be awarded 33 seats, the PPP/C 31 seats, and the joint list would get one seat.
It is not clear where this new figure for valid votes originates as it does not align with the numbers submitted by Lowenfield more than a week ago.
“He would have to tell us where these numbers come from,” opposition commission Bibi Shadick said of the report.
The recount results, which were certified by GECOM’s Secretariat, show that the PPP/C’s list of candidates has secured 233,336 votes compared to the 217,920 garnered by the incumbent APNU+AFC coalition. Under that count, the PPP/C has won the March 2 General Elections by 15,416 votes. Based on the figures, the PPP/C would have 33 seats in the new Parliament, the incumbent APNU+AFC, 31, and list of LJP, ANUG and TNM would share one seat.
As part of his summary of the observation reports generated during the recount, the CEO had previously declared that across all Electoral Districts only 185,260 votes cast could be considered valid. Of the number of votes deemed valid by Lowenfield in that report the majority was cast in favour of the incumbent as the alternative count grants the coalition 125,010 votes and the PPP/C 56,628.
