Allegations of electoral fraud disingenuous – APNU/AFC pollster

A Partnership for National Unity/Alliance For Change (APNU/AFC) has come in for flak from a pollster the party previously hired, as questions have been raised about why the party did not address constitutional reform during its time in office.

In a panel discussion on News talk Radio Guyana, Peter Wickham, a noted regional pollster and head of the Caribbean Development Research Services (CADRES), opined that APNU/AFC, particularly AFC, wasted its opportunity.
He added that the reason the AFC is in business was to have electoral reform and power-sharing. “To have a better system of governance in Guyana, that’s how the AFC got into the whole thing. You were in office for the better part of five years, and what have you done in that regard?” Wickham asked.

“So, to come and talk about the fact that you want these things now, when there was no single initiative to deal with issues of electoral reform, the bloated list. You had a vote of No Confidence which essentially brought an end to the administration. And then you go back quarrelling about these things again, when you had the opportunity and did nothing.”

According to Wickham, the will of the people and the judgement of Guyanese is clear. What is now important, he noted, is to get on with the job of installing a new government, and for politicians to put Guyana first.
He also questioned APNU/AFC’s constant allegations of electoral fraud. Wickham pointed out that every polling place had scrutineers who were drawn from that locality. According to him, it therefore means that they should have been able to identify a dead person who showed up at a polling station to vote.

“So, if there is all this evidence of fraud…you need to come with some kind of rigorous evidence. In all the instances I’ve come across of electoral rigging, it’s usually done by the persons who are in office. If you’re out of office and you can rig an election, that is a genius,” Wickham also opined.

“If there wasn’t the hanky-panky with the Statements of Poll (Mingo), we wouldn’t be having this conversation today. Because, to the best of my knowledge, the recount was coming to an end. Everybody was happy with it. There were no suggestions of dead or migrated people. So, to me, to bring it up now is a bit disingenuous,” he said.

Constitutional reform was one of the main promises on the coalition’s 2015 Elections Manifesto, but the Administration has been heavily criticised for not delivering. APNU, specifically the People’s National Congress (PNC) component, had previously deflected blame for failure to address constitutional reform. In October of last year, PNCR executive retired Rear Admiral Gary Best had thrown the blame on other members of the National Assembly.

“We had to get at least two-thirds of the Members [of the National Assembly] to vote for the many clauses and articles that are now in the Constitution. So constitutional reform is not an activity for the party in power, it’s an activity for all the parties in power and parties that seek to have power…

“It can’t be done without the cooperation of the other Members of Parliament, which are from the PPP [People’s Progressive Party]. So that’s one of the issues with constitutional reform. It has to be a national effort,” Best had said.
Further questioned as to what was done by the coalition to reach out to the parliamentary Opposition to advance the process of constitutional reform, Best had contended that there was always an open-door policy for discussions on the matter.

There is a Constitutional Reform Commission Bill that was to be examined by a bi-partisan committee chaired by Attorney General Basil Williams, but there have been accusations made of members of the committee stalling the process. And while fingers continued to be pointed, the bill languished.

In the meantime, with the National Recount over and the PPP/C have been shown to have won the elections by 15,416 votes, calls for power sharing continue to be made.