The current criminal proceedings and the elections petitions stemming from the March 2nd polls appear to have led government to shelve its plans to proceed with an independent inquiry into the attempt to manipulate the results.
“Now that the High Court is seized of the matter and will be conducting an inquiry into the elections, we have to examine the situation carefully to see if there is any legal room for any other type of inquiry outside of the criminal charges that have been petitioned,” Attorney General Anil Nandlall told Stabroek News.
“…Under Article 163 of the constitution, the High Court is vested with exclusive jurisdiction to inquire into elections. Once that exclusive jurisdiction has been activated, it may not be possible to activate another civil process in the form of an inquiry, simply because of the nature of the high court jurisdiction,” Nandlall further explained.
Just six days after he was sworn in following a tumultuous five-month wait on the finalisation of the elections results, President Irfaan Ali announced a planned review of the elections process and to hold anyone who tried to undermine the polling to account.
“A review of events related to the electoral process over the last five months will begin shortly in order to determine, forensically, exactly what transpired, and to hold accountable any persons who sought to pervert and corrupt the system,” Ali said at his Inauguration on August 8th.
Region Four Returning Officer Clairmont Mingo was accused of twice presenting falsified figures – on March 5th and March 13th – and the major observer groups had found his tabulation not to be credible.
The Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) subsequently executed a recount exercise that showed that the PPP/C had won the majority of votes. However, the credibility of the results determined by the recount have been challenged by the APNU+AFC, which has claimed that alleged irregularities that were uncovered compromised the polls.
Mingo, Chief Election Officer Keith Lowenfield and APNU+AFC agent Volda Lawrence have since been faced with criminal charges, including conspiracy to commit fraud, for their alleged roles in the attempted manipulation of the results. The charges faced by Mingo and Lowenfield include alleged misconduct in public office. Sheffern February, a clerk employed by GECOM, was a charged with two counts of attempting to defraud the people of Guyana, while Enrique Livan, an Information Technology officer attached to GECOM, was also taken before the court on a charge of manipulating the numbers of the statements of poll that were recorded in the system so that they reflected fraudulent numbers for District Four.
In addition, two separate elections petitions challenging the results have been filed.
Nandlall said that government would want to proceed with an independent investigation but he reminded that already a full-scale police investigation has been launched and five employees of GECOM have been arrested and have been assisting the police in their investigation, while a number of criminal charges had also been filed and the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) has since intervened and taken over the prosecution of those charges and has also filed separate charges.
“The investigations, however, are still continuing. I suspect that other senior functionaries of GECOM would also be assisting the police with further investigations,” he said, while also pointing to the elections petitions.
“When you look at the lawyers involved it is clear they are filed on behalf of the APNU+AFC,” he added.
Ali had also announced that his government will pursue the necessary electoral reforms so as to strengthen democracy and make the electoral process more transparent.
Last Friday, Nandlall told the National Assembly that his ministry will spearhead wide-ranging reforms, including legislative reforms to the electoral process to make it “stronger, more transparent, more accountable and to ensure that it is manned by persons of high integrity and professional ethics, so as to prevent the electoral machinery from being hijacked by political fraudsters, who cannot win government through the will of the people.”
