Former AFC Executive Asquith Rose responds to Cathy Hughes

Your statement is pathetic, appalling and absurd. You have no solid proof as to how the PPP rigged the election. It is hearsay, rumours, good guessing and APNU+AFC propaganda. Further, based on your statement, which is pure garbage, you should blame GECOM.

Don’t be like the silly Harmon with your (unsubstantiated) claims of unstamped ballots, destroyed ballots, authenticity of the ballots, votes cast without ID cards, the number of proxies issued, statistical anomalies, breaches of counterfoil foils, missing poll books, boxes without records, and overvoting. These are all GECOM’s problems or failures. Do you have a list of the dead and migrated people whom you publicly claim had voted? How do you know who they voted for?
By the way, what about the Russians who came to Guyana to rig the elections, as mentioned by you and Ramjattan. Can you send me pictures of them in handcuffs being deported? I am objective, and I do not support any political party in Guyana. I only support democracy, but I believe that it is time for you, Joe Harmon and others to stop lying and stop embarrassing yourselves and the people of Guyana. It’s a shame.
Why can’t you admit that you lost the election? You all were elected by a mere 4506 votes in 2015, and immediately began to govern like Lords, Kings and Queens and have ignored the people who voted for the coalition. You all were aloof, arrogant and untouchables whom the people could not reach by email, phone or in person.
You all stood in your ivory towers as ministers. So how do you expect to win this election after neglecting the people for 5 years and making a ton of mistakes, and Granger was nowhere in sight?
Also, from the beginning, it was a phony coalition of six parties, three of which (Scott Sharma and Allicock) were one-man parties which cannot garner any votes. The WPA was defunct and the AFC has lost its support base in Berbice. So for Granger to say on numerous times that his government comprised of six parties was puerile.
In addition, how do you expect to win the election after losing the two local government elections by almost a two-to-one margin? To make matters worse, Granger was an indecisive, visionless and very poor leader, and an elitist to boot. But the truth is, any government which controls the election machinery and allows the opposition to rig and win an election is “not fit and proper to govern, period.” These are Mr. Granger’s words.
Please stop your nonsense and do the right thing and vacate your office. It is highly offensive and repugnant to read or even listen to any one of you. You all are exact examples of what are known as sour grapes.

Businesswire article
In a Businesswire article published on June 11, it was stated that the APNU+AFC, two political parties of Guyana that formed a coalition in 2015, issued the following statement regarding the recount of ballots in Guyana.
On March 2, 2020, the people of Guyana went to the polls to determine their national and regional representation. They did so on a Voter’s List of 660,000 so-called registered voters from a population estimated at 780,000, which included a national school population of 260,000.
All previous efforts at re-verification to cleanse the list of the dead and migrated and present a credible list of voters were thwarted by the main opposition party – the People’s Progressive Party (PPP). The Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) abandoned its effort in 2019 to conduct a house-to-house exercise, which would have resulted in a List of Voters (LOE) consistent with the country’s population size.
In the end, on March 2, 2020, GECOM presented an LOE with a total of 660,000 voters, which to most observers was the first red flag in a process that would eventually lead to fraud. It is deemed a statistical impossibility to have such a voter’s list against a population of a mere 780,000 inhabitants. In preparing for the elections, therefore, GECOM would have been required to produce and distribute sufficient ballots to satisfy the list of voters in each electoral district.
In this difficult environment, President David Granger ordered a total recount of ballots cast under the supervision of a team of scrutineers from CARICOM, the region’s regional economic community, and on May 6, 2020 the recount began.
In respect to the methodology, the gazetted order for the Recount indicated that GECOM, “in exercise of the authority vested in it under Article 162 of the Constitution and pursuant to Section 22 of the Elections Law (Amendment) Act, Chapter 1:03, in implementing its decisions relating to the conduct of the aforementioned recount of all ballots cast at the said elections, including the reconciliation of the:
Ballots issued with the ballots cast, destroyed, spoiled, stamped and as deemed necessary, their counterfoils/ stubs;
Authenticity of the ballots and the number of voters listed and crossed out as having voted;
The number of votes cast without ID cards;
The number of proxies issued and the number utilized;
Statistical anomalies;
Occurrences recorded in the Poll Book.”
The recount process which began under the watchful eyes of observer groups and monitoring teams, both local and overseas, including the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), has been witnessing some amazing discrepancies and outright fraudulent activities that would have caused concerns in any jurisdiction which prides itself on a democratic process of one-man one-vote.
The Businesswire is managed by Former Minister Catherine Hughes out of the APNU-AFC Media Centre.