Since the elections debacle largely between the People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C) and A Partnership for National Unity/Alliance for Change (APNU+AFC) government came somewhat to an end with the transfer of authority to the former, the new regime has not stopped promising constitutional and electoral changes to prevent what it deems a blatant effort by APNU+AFC to steal the election. Of course, on its part APNU+AFC has also been mulling reforms that it claims are necessary to prevent an ‘illegitimate’ government from ever again taking power by way of illegal voting. The above positions are rooted in the single contention that the March 2020 elections were manipulated and since similar claims are at present being made in the United States one is forced to look more closely at its vaunted democratic processes, and I have come upon some lessons, that will be presented in two parts, which could be of importance to Guyana.
Briefly and in the interest of context; after some delay, much of which was due to the present Covid-19 pandemic and the resultant large number of postal ballots, the democratic presidential candidate, Mr. Joe Biden, was finally declared the winner of the 2020 US election by most state officials and the major media houses. Given the level of consensus, the loser would usually graciously concede and transition arrangements begin to allow for a seamless transfer of government to the ‘president elect’ on 20th January of the new year. There is no law that compels the incumbent to concede but experience has shown that an awkward transition could be costly to the country.
However, President Donald Trump who can be viewed as something of an ethnic entrepreneur, received some 72 million votes and these came largely from white Republican Americans whose belief that the system has treated them unfairly and needs to be radically changed – ‘drain the swamp’ – he has encouraged. He remains extremely popular among these Republican voters, which largely accounts for his apparent control of the party establishment. So far not only has he refused to concede but he has been approaching many local elections bodies and the courts with many unsubstantiated claims that the election was manipulated. The transition officially begins when the funds allocated by Congress – US$10 million – for that purpose are released by the General Services Administration, but Trump has not only not released the funds but has also refused to provide the Biden transition team with the usual courtesies of office space, access to essential personnel, etc.
The first lesson has to do with the transition period itself. Apart from its usefulness in facilitating the familiarisation with and preparation for government, the transition period was intended to account for the physical conditions of travel and related conveniences in the 18th and 19th centuries. But importantly, as we are now witnessing, it also provides the kind of space for elections dispute resolution that is not present in Guyana. In the USA, laws demand that electoral management bodies and courts immediately intervene and solve disputes at almost any point in the electoral process.
For example, the 2002 Help America Vote Act requires states to establish and maintain uniform and nondiscriminatory systems to deal with any person who believes that there has been a violation of any provision of the Act ‘including a violation which has occurred, is occurring, or is about to occur’ in a timely manner. Most states have such mechanisms in the form of local election boards that do the actual day to day elections management work. Pennsylvania, a state of 12.8 million and 20 Electoral College votes that finally took Joe Biden to the 270 Electoral College votes he needed to win the 2020 election, has County Boards of Elections with the authority ‘To investigate election frauds, irregularities and violations of this act (Pennsylvania Election Code), and to report all suspicious circumstances to the district attorney.’
GECOM claims that it has no such authority and usually hands the government to a winner that has a motive and the machinery to try and stymie a legal process that could drive it from office. Just imagine the turmoil that could have resulted if Trump’s claims of electoral manipulation were allowed to gain traction by being the subject of years-long litigation. The Westminster-type elections petition may be appropriate in a context where election challenges are about individual constituencies and will only very rarely result in the entire government being driven from office. For this and the other reasons outlined above, formally structured US transition-type arrangements appear more appropriate for presidential systems. Lesson two has to do with the structure of the electoral machinery. For many the major problem is that the manager of Guyana’s elections – GECOM – is in the hands of the very politicians whom it must serve, and there is accordingly a view that it should be reformed to at least include more independent members. I have argued before that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with the management structure of GECOM (Future Notes, SN: 17/07/2019). Furthermore, it is almost impossible for the major stakeholders i.e., the major political parties, to agree upon one ‘neutral’ chairperson much less to agree upon six such neutral persons and/or the method by which a board consisting of such persons will be established. The usual recommendation of the need for an independent elections management authority by the international community either fails to grasp the extremely divisive ethnic nature of Guyana and the perception of the cost associated with losing elections or has a diluted notion of neutrality, i.e. one that is uncircumscribed by political association.
Philadelphia has a population of 1.5 million and is the most populous city in Pennsylvania. It has a three-member bipartisan elections commission – two Democrats and one Republican – that serves a four-year term that coincides with mayoral and city council elections and voter registration. This partisan arrangement is not unusual in the US, yet all the bluster of Donald Trump about elections being manipulated in Pennsylvania and elsewhere has not found any traction with those in control of elections management; not only because the claims are false but also because their baselessness is dealt with promptly.
The political nature of Guyana that encourages ethnic entrepreneurship and thus increases the perception of the cost of losing, by the population and their various ethnic representatives, is the main problem that has to be dealt with by a different governance mechanism. However, political tension can presently be reduced if governments can be perceived as operating more equitably and within an electoral process that is fair and does not allow claims of electoral fraud to fester. Here, a transition period and legal electoral arrangements such as exist in the US could be of enormous assistance.
