Despite A Partnership for National Unity/Alliance For Change (APNU/AFC) leader and former President David Granger saying that his party would have completed its election petition and filed it by Monday, the document is still incomplete.
APNU/PNC Leader David Granger
This is according to one of the coalition’s candidates and attorney, Roysdale Forde. Granger had announced last week that the petition was likely to be completed by this weekend and filed on Monday.
But in an interview with this newspaper, Forde said that they are still working on completing the petition. He could not say when the petition will be finalised. Asked if there have been challenges with preparing the document, which would include finding evidence to support APNU/AFC’s case, he denied this.
“It has not been filed as yet… it is being prepared. (No timeframe) as yet,” he said, adding that there are no difficulties in its preparation.
The National Assembly (Validity of Elections) Act stipulates that an election petition must be filed in the High Court within 28 days of the election results being declared and published in the Guyana Gazette under Section 99 of the Representation of the People Act.
The Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) declared the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) the winner of the elections on August 2, allowing for President Dr Irfaan Ali to be sworn in. His Cabinet was sworn in days later.
APNU/AFC lawyer Roysdale Forde
But APNU/AFC continues to maintain that there was fraudulent voting in the March 2 elections, despite the absence of evidence. Throughout the 33-day recount at the Arthur Chung Conference Centre (ACCC), APNU/AFC agents consistently claimed that voters who were issued with ballots were either dead or migrated. These unsubstantiated allegations went to the point where APNU/AFC called out the names of alleged migrant and dead voters and also produced their death certificates. However, they have never been able to publicly prove that these persons were issued with ballots and ticked off on the pink Official List of Electors (OLE) and a number of so-called ‘migrant voters’ came forward to disprove the APNU/AFC claims.
In addition, one of APNU’s own counting agents at the time and now a nominee for Parliament, Ganesh Mahipaul had told media operatives outside the ACCC back in May that the coalition did not in fact have access to the immigration records.
According to Mahipaul, the information was instead gathered through fieldwork done by its membership which was then consolidated into a list of likely suspects.
Asked to present the media with some form of evidence for which the APNU/AFC is making its ‘credible claims’, Mahipaul told reporters: “Not going to attempt to present what is to be presented, because we have to confirm first in the counting stations that the persons voted by way of having their names ticked.”
After the certified recount results showed a win for the PPP/C, APNU/AFC had refused to accept the results and had gone to court in an effort to force GECOM to use the discredited results from the declarations of the Returning Officers. However, the courts ruled that APNU/AFC’s claims of voter fraud could only be addressed in an election petition.
Granger had previously expressed hope that the petition, when filed, will be dealt with swiftly by the court. But the PPP’s own election petition, filed after the 2015 General and Regional Elections, was buried in the High Court and has failed to see the light of day after years. (G3)
