Jagdeo calls for swift election declaration

…says CCJ ruling vindicates PPP/C, election observers, int’l community

Now that the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) has ruled, Opposition Leader Bharrat Jagdeo has said that it is clear that Chief Elections Officer (CEO) Keith Lowenfield has no choice but to prepare a final report based on the recount results that show the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) winning the 2020 General and Regional Elections.

PPP General Secretary Bharrat Jagdeo made this pronouncement shortly after the CCJ ruling that Lowenfield’s invalidation of over 115,000 votes is unlawful, and that the Court of Appeal (COA) exceeded its jurisdiction when it interpreted Article 177 (2) of the Constitution of Guyana, which says “more votes are cast” to mean “more ‘valid’ votes are cast”.
“We are extremely pleased that the Caribbean Court of Justice has set aside the decision of the Court of Appeal of Guyana…we believed from the beginning that the decision of the COA was perverse. We argued that they lacked jurisdiction, that the Article that they used to infringe on other matters relating to the elections has nothing to do with the qualifications of the President, and therefore they were acting outside of their jurisdiction. Today (Wednesday) we’re being vindicated in the sense that the Court of Appeal acted in excess of its declaration,” the General Secretary also said.
Section 87 (2) of the Representation of the People’s Act makes clear the conditions under which a vote is deemed invalid. The Act makes no mention of the absence of statutory documents invalidating votes.

According to Section 87 (2) of the Act, “In counting the votes the returning officer shall, subject to subsection (3), reject as invalid and not count any ballot paper (a) which does not bear the official mark (b) which has not been marked for any list of candidates or is void for uncertainty (c) on which votes have been given for more than one list of candidates (d) on which there is any writing or mark by which the elector can be identified.”
According to Jagdeo, it is important that no further attempts be made to prevent GECOM from doing its job.
Jagdeo also expressed his pleasure that the court threw out the Chief Elections Officer’s report. Jagdeo pointed out that when the Court of Appeal had ruled previously, Lowenfield had compiled his controversial report within 24 hours on the basis of that ruling.

New report
As such, Jagdeo noted that Lowenfield should have no problems quickly complying with the decision of a superior court. He laid out his expectations that the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) will now convene a meeting and Lowenfield submit a report in accordance with the CCJ ruling, delivered by the regional court’s President, Justice Adrian Saunders.
“We are extremely pleased that they (CCJ) also set aside Lowenfield’s report that had fraudulently disenfranchised over 115,000 persons. But in doing so, the President of the Court, reading out part of a summary of a unanimous decision, he pointed out how Lowenfield had acted unlawfully.
“The CEO is bound…he needs to prepare the report in accordance with the instructions given to him by the Chair of GECOM, which is to use the recount data which shows a victory for the PPP/C. The CEO has clear guidance now, let us see if he will continue to act unlawfully or in accordance with the guidance of the CCJ, a superior court,” Jagdeo also said.
GECOM has since announced that a meeting will be convened at 1:30 pm on June 9, 2020.
In Lowenfield’s fraudulent report, the CEO had claimed that the APNU/AFC coalition garnered 171,825 votes while the PPP/C gained 166,343 votes. How the CEO arrived at those figures is unknown, since the certified results from the legally conducted recount exercise supervised by GECOM and a high-level team from the Caribbean Community (Caricom) pellucidly show that the PPP/C won with 233,336 votes while the APNU/AFC garnered 217,920.
Lowenfield’s attempt to alter the results of the recount and deny the will of the people comes on the heels of two previous attempts he made to give legitimacy to the fraudulent declarations of Region Four Returning Officer Clairmont Mingo.
Mingo, during the tabulation of votes following the March 2 elections, used figures which were heavily inflated in favour of the APNU/AFC coalition – vastly differing from the official numbers recorded on the Statements of Poll (SoPs).
On March 5, Mingo declared fraudulent results for District Four, prompting the PPP/C to move to the courts, which scrapped those results and ordered that the process be done through the legally prescribed procedure. When the process was resumed, Mingo still proceeded to use concocted numbers, and he eventually made a second fraudulent declaration on March 13.
Mingo had declared that the APNU/AFC won 136,057 votes for District Four, while the PPP/C won 77,231. But the certified recount process clearly shows that for Region Four, the APNU/AFC won 116,941 votes while PPP/C won 80,920.