GECOM fails to provide statement it claims was signed by DROs

The Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) is yet to produce a statement it claims was signed by a group of Region Four Deputy Returning Officers, refuting allegations made by another Region Four DRO, Paul Jaisingh that it was GECOM who had ordered that critical documents not be placed in the ballot boxes on Election Night.

Jaisingh had said, in a letter to GECOM, that he had received instructions from Carlyn Duncan, Clerk to the Region Four Returning Officer, Clairmont Mingo to exclude certain statutory documents from their ballot boxes when they completed the count on Election night.

Jaisingh had said in his email to the Chair of GECOM, Justice Claudette Singh, that Duncan gave instructions “to include only unused, valid and rejected ballots in the ballot boxes,” and that “this was communicated to the respective Presiding Officers who complied.”

Jaisingh added “As a result, the other documents were placed in the bag provided. This instruction was given on Election Day a few hours before the close of the poll. Other Deputy Returning Officers affected by this decision can confirm the same.”

In response, the Commission had sent out a press release claiming that “A group of Deputy Returning Officers (DROs) who were responsible for clusters of Polling Stations on the East Coast of Demerara, Region 4 has submitted a signed statement to the Secretariat of the Guyana Elections Commission refuting allegations that the Clerk to Region 4 Returning Officer, Ms. Carolyn Duncan instructed them to advise the Presiding Officers to not include the official documents in the ballot boxes at the close of poll. This statement refutes an article being circulated on social media which emanated from an e-mail sent to the Guyana Elections Commission by another DRO, Mr. Paul Jaisingh.”

Despite repeated requests to view the statement it claims was provided however, or the identities of the DROs who were said to have signed the statement, no proof has been provided from the Secretariat.
When GECOM’s Public Relations Officer, Yolanda Ward sent the press releases to members of the media on Saturday afternoon in a Whatsapp group, one reporter asked Ward for a copy of the letter, so that it could be presented alongside Jaisingh’s letter. Ward said that she would seek permission to do so.

As it got closer to press time on Saturday night, Ward was asked multiple times, including by Kaieteur News, for a copy of the letter and she did not respond. Other questions were posed to Ward on that day, in relation to the matter, about the DROs in Region Four and the polling stations and sub-districts managed by them. She was also asked which of the DROs supposedly sign on to the letter, and was reminded even up to last night, that the press awaits a copy of the letter. All of these questions went unanswered.

Noticing discourse about the matter in the public, one young man, Steve Anthony Datta took to Facebook yesterday to ventilate his account of what happened while he worked as a Presiding Officer at Enmore Hope Primary School. Datta’s polling station was not among the 29 implicated in the aforementioned matter, but he had noticed a Facebook post by a Coalition spokesperson, Christopher Jones, that “electoral fraud” was detected at the polling station Datta presided over. Jones stated that for the polling station, “72 ordinary ballots cannot be accounted for. No unused ballots in envelope.”

Datta pointed out his years of experience in banking and accounting, to underscore that he would not be engaged in any “unethical issues” or matters of fraud, and asked whether the political agents of the PPP and the Coalition would have signed off on the process if they had noticed any fraudulent act. He said that the Presiding Officers were instructed via a Whatsapp group created for the Election that the unused ballots should go into the bags, not the ballot box. To support his claims, Datta provided screenshots of the Whatsapp group, created on February 17, just weeks before the Election. Datta said that on Election Night, as the screenshot shows, that at 18:04hrs, a Clerk to the Deputy Returning Officer for that area forwarded three messages which stated “Unused ballot going into the bags”, “Not the ballot box” and “Please inform ur PO”.

The Coalition has been making a series of unsubstantiated allegations of electoral fraud against the PPP, since the start of the recount, and intensified this campaign when a significant portion of the boxes had been recounted, putting the PPP in a considerable lead. Just days ago, when the PPP’s lead became almost insurmountable, the Coalition declared that the elections results coming out of the recount cannot be considered credible, and asked GECOM to discard the valid votes cast for the 29 East Coast boxes, for which the area is a stronghold of the PPP.

Justice Singh decided yesterday during a meeting of the Commission, to allow the tabulation of the near 7000 valid votes from the 29 boxes on the grounds that the voters should not be disenfranchised.