‘Smoke and Mirrors’ – How APNU+AFC failed to fool the international community

A Partnership for National Unity + Alliance For Change (APNU+AFC) has lost its bid for re-election in the March 2 General and Regional Elections. This began to make itself evident very early on in March, after two attempts were made to rig the Region Four results to favour the coalition. However, a national recount was painstakingly convened to correct the fraud by the Returning Officer, Clairmont Mingo.

Some would wonder how the weight of 100 countries has been thrown behind calls for a declaration of the results of the national vote recount, despite myriad claims of electoral fraud by APNU+AFC. After all, the Guyanese people had been treated to an online campaign of misinformation and false reports from the governing coalition – one that continues to proliferate itself today, in some regards.

There were claims of stopped counts in several recount workstations, although GECOM’s live audio feed clearly indicated that work was proceeding smoothly, and so did other parties. There were claims of a secret meeting in the very public tabulation centre between agents of the People’s Progressive Party Civic (PPP/C) and a GECOM staffer; a claim that GECOM dismissed summarily. The first claim of a ‘dead voter’ also surfaced in the first week, with a death certificate posted online, but no nexus drawn to prove that a vote was cast. Kaieteur News determined early on that the campaign of misinformation was concerted when the coalition had made a series of claims which turned out to be wildly exaggerated or patently false.

JJ&B

On March 31, the Coalition sought the services of Washington based lobbying firm – JJ&B LLC in efforts to reverse what it referred to as the “false narrative” being peddled in the international community by the PPP/C. It claimed that the PPP/C was tarnishing its reputation through Mercury Public Affairs.
A 147-page dossier was included with the federal documents seen by Kaieteur News, containing a watered down version of 2020 election events and glaring statements including listing both President David Granger and Joseph Harmon as US citizens.

Allegations then surfaced that the party utilised public funds in its hire. However, according to its campaign manager, Joseph Harmon, it was “upset” Coalition supporters residing overseas who funded the hire. The coalition government then attempted to wash its hands of the hire after a statement emerged from the President’s office denying any involvement. The federal documents however, showed otherwise and clearly debunked the government’s denial. Opposition Leader, Bharrat Jagdeo, later revealed that he filed a complaint with the United States Department of Justice against the lobbying firm for what they termed a “fraudulent filing”.International Observers

COVID-19 became a factor in the organisation of the recount from its onset. Some were so worried that the pandemic could be weaponised to inhibit the transparency of the process, especially when Prime Minister, Moses Nagamootoo, said that international observers wanting to travel to Guyana would have to be quarantined for two weeks before being allowed to observe the recount.A later intervention by President David Granger reversed that decision, but it turned out that that privilege was only granted to CARICOM Scrutineers.

Any other international observer who wanted to observe the process would not be allowed in. It was actually the President who gave the order to block the Carter Center’s re-entry, and his refusal was repeated twice. In a letter addressed to US Ambassador, Sarah-Ann Lynch, Minister of Foreign Affairs Karen Cummings justified the Government’s refusal, by stating “The public health situation in Guyana has changed drastically since the Regional and General Elections held on March 2…”

The President later took the opportunity to justify his refusal of the Carter Center’s re-entry, by saying that CARICOM is the “most legitimate interlocutor” on the Guyana situation. Other international observer groups did not indicate that they would return to observe the recount, except for the OAS, which sent a few members of its team who were already in Guyana.

For the first week of the recount, observers were handed copies of the statements of the recount for the recounted ballot boxes – the document is equivalent to a statement of poll. However, after noticing that this was happening, GECOM’s higher-ups made a decision to discontinue the process, describing it as an error. Government Commissioner Vincent Alexander argued that such a practice was not provided for in the recount order – Order No. 60 of 2020. In a subsequent interview, Alexander addressed the issue again, explaining that it is not an international norm for observers to be given such documents.

Electoral Fraud?

On May 10, the coalition’s campaign manager, Joseph Harmon, said that the campaign was called ‘Operation Eagle Eye’. However, he didn’t share the view that there was misinformation – just that it was meant to guarantee that the recount process is fully scrutinised and transparent.Harmon also said that the campaign was necessary, as the coalition’s Election Day agents may not have been as efficient as they should have been.

Despite APNU+AFC officials hailing the credibility and fairness of the elections when Mingo’s false results had handed the coalition a victory, APNU+AFC Recount Supervisor, Leonard Craig, said that the party observed “anomalies” since the night of the elections, and that previous statements about the fairness of the process were just “general statements”. He also said that the party was preparing for the possibility of an election petition. Asked why it would challenge an election it believed it won, he said that the petition would show that it won by an even larger margin.
On May 16, Attorney General Basil Williams told the press that the recount was illegal.
In a subsequent interview, APNU+AFC candidate and attorney-at-law Roysdale Forde agreed with Williams’ legal opinion.

Then on May 17, President David Granger told reporters that he will accept “any” declaration made by GECOM.President Granger also told reporters that he had never said the elections were free, fair and credible, but that he said they were free, fair and orderly. He said that GECOM would now have to determine whether the elections were credible.

In a subsequent interview, PNCR executive, Aubrey Norton, elaborated on more of the party’s claims of electoral fraud, this is what he said: “What this is illustrating is that the process teems with irregularities. From the inception, I said it cannot be considered to be anomalies anymore. This is a clear case of electoral fraud and rigging.”
The following, though not an exhaustive list, illustrates some of the major claims made by the coalition during the national recount of votes, and how they failed to hold weight.

False claim about APNU+AFC’s Region One vote recount

Region One was the first to be recounted in totality. On May 17, PNCR executive Norton told reporters that the recount of Region One showed that the coalition got 120 more votes in the general election than the District’s declaration had shown, and that the votes were misplaced during the initial Region One count. An examination of the documents in question would show that Norton’s claim was false. Kaieteur News informed Norton that the coalition’s vote count had not increased by 120 votes – that they had only increased by four.“When we did the calculation,” Norton said in response, “I don’t know where you get the Maths from, but when we did the calculation, our votes increased by 120.”
Asked whether he looked at GECOM’s tabulation, Norton said “No. I haven’t.”

Continuing, Norton said that the party would not sign off on any certificate for the Region, despite its agents already signing off on all of the statements of recount. Minutes after he left the media tent, Kaieteur News discovered that the coalition’s agent had already signed off on the Region One certificate.
As AFC’s David Patterson passed by the media tent, Kaieteur News asked him for clarity and Patterson said that he didn’t know of any signing.
The coalition decided not to sign off on any more of the Region certificates. However, they continued to sign off on the statements of recount.

‘Migrant Voters’

Craig had said in his interview with reporters that the coalition could provide evidence of ‘migrant voters’ by producing immigration records.However, Craig explained that the party did not want to release the information to the public, as some small parties were concerned over the publication of people’s private records.
At some point later in the interview, Craig even backpedaled on his claim of access to immigration records when asked how the party could have personal immigration records, opting instead to say that the information was gleaned from party agents who did on-the-ground research in every village.

Craig’s colleague, Ganesh Mahipaul, came one week later. On May 19, Mahipaul who was a counting agent for the coalition admitted that the party had no evidence to support its claims of ‘migrant voters’.
The first apparent list the coalition submitted to GECOM was attached to Berbice ballot box #6007. Upon examination of this list of five voters claimed to be out of the jurisdiction, one Kaieteur News reporter recognized two of the individuals named. They, a married couple, were the reporter’s neighbours. The couple, Aubrey and Shirley Nicholson told and proved to Kaieteur News, by showing their passports, that they were in the country on Election Day, and that they voted at Sisters Village Primary School before spending the rest of the day with their grandchildren. The couple even told Kaieteur News that they voted for APNU+AFC.

On May 27, after weeks of claiming that the party would provide evidence to support all of its claims of fraud, Norton told reporters that it would only give GECOM a list. The list, he said, is “what we call evidence.”
He said that it would be GECOM’s job to probe the claims.

Subsequently, Kaieteur News found out that Harmon had sent a list of over 100 names to Justice Singh, and that she had written to the Police Commissioner, Leslie James, asking that he assist GECOM with the verification of the claims. GECOM’s Public Relations Officer, Yolanda Ward later confirmed that GECOM didn’t even check the list to ensure that the persons listed had actually had votes cast in their names. Nevertheless, the Top Cop, after having the Immigration Department process the list, returned a new list as a subset of the initial list, to the GECOM Chair, claiming that the persons named were not in the country on Election Day.Soon after Kaieteur News received and published a copy of the list.

Persons, whose names appeared on the list, began to come forward, proving that they were in the country on Election Day. When it was first reported, the Guyana Police Force responded in a statement, implying that it did not have the correct records because the persons who came forward may not have travelled back to Guyana illegally. But some of them had not even left the country in the first place. It became apparent that the information provided by the Immigration Department was not reliable.

Claims that Joint Services ranks were disenfranchised
Norton, on May 22, told reporters “that there is a close correlation between unstamped ballots and APNU+AFC strongholds.” The PNCR Executive told the press that “We have seen that, wherever there is intermixing for the Joint Services, a large number of ballots have not been stamped.”

His claim was also published on May 22 by the Department of Public Information (DPI) which outright stated in an article, that the “irregularities” discovered by the party are instances of “electoral fraud” which included “the more than 8,000 unstamped ballots of the disciplined forces.”

A simple check found these statements to be false. Kaieteur News debunked the false statements made by Norton and propagated by DPI, on June 1 and subsequently released the report on June 2 – 11, days after Norton made the statement. This newspaper reported GECOM’s Public Relations Officer Yolanda Ward, following Norton’s claim, stating that only 1,536 ballots had been rejected as of June 1 in the National Recount. The claim was that over 8,000 disciplined services ballots were unstamped, even though all the ballot boxes were not yet opened. There was no way as of that date that it could have been known that over 8,000 disciplined services ballots were unstamped.
Even then, when the National Recount ended, GECOM’s General Election tabulation showed that only 4,211 ballots were rejected. The unstamped total is not even that high, as ballots may be rejected for other reasons than lack of stamp.

‘Dead voters’
The coalition’s Amna Ally claimed, during the recount, that there were “countless” dead voters, and that proof would be forthcoming. The only death certificate put to the public during the recount was that of a woman who was identified as Chitnandani Ramdass. She died in June of 2015.
Reporters at the State newspaper, Guyana Chronicle, published the death certificate in an article, and later told Kaieteur News that the document was given to them by Ganesh Mahipaul.
The coalition provided this as “proof” of a ‘dead voter’.

Kaieteur News examined the May 20 article, and found that there was no statement that a vote had actually been cast in the woman’s name. GECOM officials have noted that the information it gets from the General Registrar’s Officer may not be completely reliable. Hence, there will be deceased persons whose names are still on the Official List of Electors (OLE).

Kaieteur News was able to obtain a copy of the observation report linked to the polling station Ramdass would have voted in, had she been alive – Box #2107 from Mariah’s Hall Nursery School. The serial number for Ramdass was noted on the observation report as part of the coalition’s claims of electoral fraud. However, an official copy of the polling station’s OLE otherwise known as the Pink List, showed that the woman’s name was not ticked as voted, which meant that no vote was cast in her name.

East Coast ballot boxes with ‘missing’ documents
There was quite a commotion, coming down to the end of the recount over 29 East Coast ballot boxes which did not have certain statutory documents, amounting to nearly 7,000 votes in areas considered to be PPP/C strongholds. The coalition demanded that GECOM discard the ballot boxes.

With the aim of providing clarity, however, Deputy Returning Officer (DRO), Paul Jaisingh, who was operating at the Chateau Margot Primary School, said that he was instructed not to include those statutory documents by the Clerk to the Returning Officer, Carolyn Duncan.
“This was communicated to the respective Presiding Officers (PO) who complied,” Jaisingh wrote in an email to the GECOM Chair.

He noted that those instructions were given on Election Day, only a few hours before the close of the poll. More importantly, he was keen to highlight that the instructions were imposed upon other DROs, who according to him, could confirm the same.

Further, a PO who spoke to Kaieteur News on the condition of anonymity, explained that she was also instructed not to include the documents into the ballot box on the night of the elections.
She explained that her DRO had also received instructions from Mingo’s clerk.

The GECOM Secretariat was quick to respond to Jaisingh’s correspondence to the Chair. It claimed that “a group of DROs who was responsible for clusters of polling stations on the East Coast had submitted a signed statement to the Secretariat of GECOM refuting allegations that the clerk to the 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.”

That “signed statement” which was alleged to have been submitted to GECOM by the DROs has not been seen by the media, despite numerous inquiries made with Yard, the spokeswoman of GECOM, in the GECOM media WhatsApp group.

One young man, Steve Anthony Datta, worked as a PO 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, implicating the station at which he worked.

Datta said that the POs 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 DRO for that area forwarded three messages which stated “Unused ballot going into the bags”, “Not the ballot box” and “Please inform ur PO”.

Int’l Community’s response
As the recount came to a close, the coalition ramped up its claims of electoral fraud. It made thousands of claims and filled social media with graphics of numbers challenging the integrity of votes in hundreds of ballot boxes.
EU Ambassador to Guyana, Fernando Ponz-Cantó, joined the conversation and said that the processes he observed on Election Day were so impressive that it was impossible to cheat.

Days before the recount came to a close, with the PPP/C in a comfortable 13,000 vote lead, the coalition said that the recount results are not credible. In response, the OAS said that it had no doubt that the recount results would be credible, and reminded that the President and Opposition Leader committed to accepting the results.
The diplomats representing America, Britain, Canada and the European Union also made statements shortly after, reminding Granger of his commitment. At the time, Kaieteur News had posed several questions to the President, who refused to respond with a commitment to accept the results of the recount.
On June 7, the coalition released a statement telling GECOM that it cannot declare the results of the recount, claiming that there were too many “fraudulent votes”.

On June 10, US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, who had made several statements over the course of the recount called for a swift conclusion of the recount. St. Vincent Prime Minister, Ralph Gonsalves, who was getting ready to assume CARICOM Chairmanship said on June 11 that CARICOM would not allow anyone to steal an election. At the time, the recount had already shown that the Coalition lost the Election with a General Election total of 217,920 votes, behind the PPP/C’s total of 233,336 votes. The next day, Granger appeared on a radio programme and falsely stated that the recount was initiated – not because of Mingo’s fraud, which he refuses to acknowledge – but because of “irregularities” even though the claims of irregularities were only made after the recount started.

In a radio interview with Kaieteur News, the late former Prime Minister of Barbados, Owen Arthur, who served as head of the Commonwealth Observer Team, warned that the results of the recount should be accepted, as “Guyana can’t withstand the fire of the entire global community”.

Days later, the CARICOM Scrutineer report was released. The team rejected the public efforts to discredit the polls, declared that the elections were “reasonably credible”. It also said that the recount results are “completely acceptable” and urged that a declaration be made on that basis.

All international observers, including the OAS, endorsed the findings of the CARICOM team, and now, 100 countries stand firmly behind the credible results of the national vote recount.