This must be a first in the world. It cannot have happened in any other democracy that a Chief Election Officer could arrogate to himself the power to decide which votes he would count in a general election and which he wouldn’t. Forget about the sovereignty of the people; that, it appears, is in the process of being eroded by a paid official at the Guyana Elections Commission.
It is not even as if Mr Keith Lowenfield can always make up his mind about which votes he wants to include and which he doesn’t. It is true he has always been consistent about who has won the election, but he has vacillated on the question of how many ballots were involved. So presumably on a whim on June 13, he boldly reported to the assembled commissioners that across all ten electoral districts only 185,260 votes could be considered valid. Never mind that the National Recount figure is 460,295. If anyone around the table gasped audibly in astonishment following his recital, they could surely be excused.
But the CEO was not finished yet. Of these 185,260 votes he allocated 125,010 to the coalition, and 56,628 to the PPP/C, in other words inverting the result of the recount which put that party ahead of the incumbent in government. What was shocking, however, was that it amounted to the invalidation of nearly 60% of all votes. Well of course he advanced various reasons for doing what he did, which included violations of polling procedures given in the Representation of the People Act and other documents, and innumerable cases of the impersonation of voters. Of course, he supplied no evidence in support of the latter; he merely accepted the slew of allegations furnished by APNU+AFC for which, it might be added, they have adduced no evidence either.
Well last Tuesday the CEO had a rethink, and he decided that instead of invalidating nearly 60% of the ballots in the March 2nd election, he would instead only discard around 25% of them, to wit, 115,787 votes. His report was submitted to Gecom and was intended as a prelude to the declaration of a result, although this has been put on hold by the Caribbean Court of Justice. He described it in an accompanying letter as a report of the “valid and credible” votes of the general and regional elections, and that his calculations were in accordance with the Representation of the People Act.
The inevitable question arises, therefore, was his previous count not in conformity with that act, and if it was not then how could the most senior official in the Secretariat who is responsible for overseeing the election put forward fictitious figures to mislead the commission which has to declare the result? Which is not to say that his latest figures are not fictitious, merely to point out that there is a huge discrepancy between the two sets of votes he cited which he has neither attempted to reconcile nor explain.
This time he arrived at a total of 344,508 votes, again considerably less than the 460,000 verified by the recount. His justification for departing from Justice Claudette Singh’s instruction to him to submit a report based on the recount of the votes in order to certify the final result (he did not submit that report by the deadline) was the Appeal Court ruling on Monday that the provision in the Constitu-tion referring to “more votes are cast” should be interpreted to mean “more valid votes are cast”. Other critical issues aside, it still does not answer the question as to why he decided there should be more “valid” votes this time, than he quoted in his last report.
So now Mr Lowenfield has a total of 171,825 votes for the APNU+AFC, 166,343 for the PPP/C and 3,348 for a joinder list of new parties. As a result, the coalition would be awarded 33 seats in a new Parliament, the PPP/C 31 seats, and the joint list one seat. This compares with the recount results showing that the PPP/C had 233,336 votes and APNU+AFC 217,920, which translates into 33 seats for the first-named party, 31 for the coalition and one for the joint list of LJP, ANUG and TNM.
Democracies require in the first instance free and fair elections. We had that on March 2nd; even the de facto President said so. The next stage is the accurate tabulation of results. We had that in nine regions, but the process was interrupted in Region Four by the illegitimate actions of the district’s Return-ing Officer Clairmont Mingo. Had that been completed there would have been a final result a few days after the poll. It has always been a simple question of completing the tallying of the Region Four votes in accordance with the law in order to obtain a final result. It was a straightforward operation which was thwarted by endless court actions and other nonsense.
A recount of all electoral districts supervised by Caricom was supposed to give us the final answer. It did. But still the coalition refuses to accept the finality of that, and worst of all, an official sits at the heart of Gecom who despite the obligations his post demands, and despite the fact he needs to display honesty and integrity in the execution of his duties, is subverting the institution for which he works, and by extension is sabotaging our fragile democracy.
No one who believes he can unilaterally choose who should be disenfranchised after their votes have been counted – and recounted – in accordance with all the relevant legal requirements should be allowed anywhere near a commission charged with overseeing a democratic election. And in any conventional democracy they wouldn’t be either. They are simply advertising the fact that they are not democrats, and that they would be more comfortable operating in some less liberal political framework. It should be added that the situation in our case is made even more unthinkable by the fact that the CEO seemingly capriciously changed his mind about whom he would disenfranchise.
Our Page One comment yesterday refers. Mr Lowenfield has to go.
