The Supreme Court has acknowledged receipt of 2,339 Statements of Poll and a similar number of Statements of Recount from the Chief Elections Officer Keith Lowenfield.
Stabroek News confirmed yesterday that in keeping with an Order from Chief Justice Roxane George-Wiltshire the documents were physically lodged with Registrar of the Supreme Court, Sueanna Lovell.
They had been received from Lowenfield two days before the January 29 deadline set by the CJ.
On January 19 Justice George-Wiltshire ordered that documents in possession of the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) from the March 2nd, 2020 elections not be destroyed before the election petition currently before the Court is fully heard and determined.
Specifically, the Chief Justice ordered that all Statements of Poll (SOPs) and Statements of Recount (SORs) be physically lodged with the Registrar of the Supreme Court for “safe keeping.”
The Order was made following a request by attorney Kashir Khan who represents the Citizenship Initiative—one of the dozen respondents in the petition, for all documents concerning the elections to be preserved.
Khan said that while the statutory period for the destruction of such material looms, it would be prudent that they be preserved given that the petition is still to be heard. He had asked for the court to take possession of all the relevant documents.
While the judge made the order, she had said that the court would not take physical possession of the documents since they were voluminous and the court hadn’t the physical storage facilities to accommodate the documents.
Khan, however, asked the court to take possession of the SOPs and SORs as together they would not be too onerous on the court to find facilities to store them as opposed to having to store all the election documents.
The judge acceded to Khan’s request and set January 29 as the deadline for compliance.
Two days before the deadline Lowenfield in the company of GECOM Chair Justice Claudette Singh and Commissioners Sase Gunraj, Vincent Alexander and Desmond Trotman delivered “all the Statement of Polls that were handed over” to him.
The Statements of Poll particularly those from Region Four were at the centre of the controversial aftermath of the March 2 General and Regional Elections (GRE).
A delay in verification of SOPs for Region Four on March 5 degenerated into a five-month delay in the announcement of results.
Returning Officer Clairmont Mingo in the early morning hours discarded the SOPs in favour of a spreadsheet of unknown origin and despite a Court order on March 11 requiring that he comply with the legislative requirement to verify each individual sheet the original SOPs were never presented.
“Instead Mingo engaged in what has been described as a “transparent effort to alter the results of [the] election”.
Head of the OAS observer mission to Guyana’s March 2nd elections, Bruce Golding in reporting to the multilateral organization accused Mingo of presenting fictitious numbers when he compiled and submitted his report.
His position was further confirmed by the Statement of Recounts which recorded numbers vastly different from those presented by Mingo.
