GECOM finalising terms for ads to replace Lowenfield, Myers & Mingo

The Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) is currently finalising the terms for advertisements to be published in order to replace top officers from its Secretariat who are before the courts for electoral fraud, and who were fired a couple of weeks ago.
On August 12, GECOM Chief Elections Officer Keith Lowenfield; his deputy, Roxanne Myers, and Returning Officer Clairmont Mingo were all dismissed. Following GECOM’s statutory meeting on Tuesday, Government-nominated Commissioner Sase Gunraj said efforts are underway to replace them.
According to the Commissioner, the terms for an advertisement were the subject of Tuesday’s meeting. The advertisements will be seeking replacements for the vacant positions, which must be filled ahead of Local Government Elections (LGE).
Local Government Elections are expected to be held in November. However, GECOM has been in turmoil for the past few years. Additionally, the Government has made it clear that GECOM must be purged of untrustworthy elements before elections.
Gunraj and his fellow Government-nominated Commissioners Bibi Shadick and Manoj Narayan had, on June 1, 2021, brought motions calling for the dismissal of Lowenfield, Myers and Mingo from GECOM.
The trio are before the courts for a number of electoral charges for their alleged attempts to sway the results of the March 2020 General and Regional Elections in favour of the then ruling A Partnership for National Unity/Alliance For Change (APNU/AFC) Government. On June 22, 2021, GECOM had unanimously decided to send the trio on leave pending the outcome of the motions.
In regard to CEO Lowenfield, the motion filed by Gunraj detailed that in spite of protests from contesting parties other than the APNU/AFC, he deliberately chose to neglect the complaints of discrepancies in relation to Mingo’s numbers.
In the case of Myers, that motion was submitted in the names of Shadick and Narayan. They argued that she aided Lowenfield in the commission of all his infractions, and even went out of her way to facilitate a meeting in a GECOM facility by then Foreign Affairs Minister Karen Cummings, where she threatened to revoke the accreditation of international observers.
Myers’s purported order to have the Guyana Police Force remove Commissioner Gunraj and political party representatives from the GECOM Command Centre during the tabulation of the Statements of Poll (SoPs) was also listed as one of the reasons she should be dismissed from her substantive post as DCEO.
Meanwhile, the grounds for Mingo’s dismissal surround his tabulation of the SoPs, in which he manufactured numbers to reflect a win for the APNU/AFC. It also concerns his conduct and defiance of the court orders mandating that he follow the outlined statutory process to acquire his final tally of the SoPs.
However, Lowenfield had countered the motions with a court case seeking to block Gunraj and Shadick from voting on the motion. He has since withdrawn the legal proceedings.
On August 12, the Elections Commission met virtually to finally vote on the three motions tabled by Government-Nominated Commissioners for the dismissals of the trio. The motions were previously debated by the Commission, but, at the last meeting held virtually on Tuesday, Opposition Commissioners Vincent Alexander and Desmond Trotman logged out before the motions could be dealt with, leaving the meeting without a quorum.
The APNU/AFC-nominated GECOM Commissioners had similarly walked out of another meeting of the Commission on July 20, when they had met to deliberate on the motion to dismiss the GECOM trio.
During the August 12 meeting, which was also virtual and lasted for approximately 30 minutes, the three Opposition-nominated Commissioners abstained from voting on all three motions, while the three Government Commissioners voted in favour of the trio’s termination.