Lowenfield moves to block Gunraj, Shadick from debating motion calling for his dismissal

One month after he was asked by the Chairperson of the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM), Retired Judge Claudette Singh, to show cause why he should not be removed from his post as Chief Elections Officer (CEO), Keith Lowenfield has now moved to the High Court to block Government-nominated Commissioners Sase Gunraj and Bibi Shadick from voting on his dismissal.
Last month, Gunraj and Shadick tabled a motion containing 20 grounds on which they called for the immediate firing of Lowenfield. They submitted that Lowenfield has breached his functions, duties, responsibilities, and obligations regarding the March 2020 National and Regional Elections.

In a bid to bar Gunraj and Shadick from voting on the motion, Lowenfield is asking the High Court to grant an order restraining them from participating as adjudicators in the hearing of the said motion. The CEO, through his lawyer Nigel Hughes, is further asking for a declaration that Gunraj and Shadick cannot properly participate, hear and determine their own complaint against him.
Lowenfield, in a Fixed Date Application, deposed that he is entitled under the terms of his employment contract and the rules of natural justice to a fair hearing, including the right to not have Gunraj and Shadick participate as arbitrators in the motion for his removal from GECOM.

According to the CEO, after he submitted his show cause response to Justice Singh, Gunraj and Shadick met to deliberate on the process upon which the Commission should proceed in relation to the hearing of their complaint. “The participation of Gunraj and Shadick in the deliberations of their own complaint was in breach of the rules of natural justice,” Lowenfield argued.
He argued also that their participation in the deliberations on their own complaint against him infected the deliberation of the Commission with bias.
The Chief Elections Officer said that after the tabling of the motion, he wrote to GECOM’s Chairperson informing her that he was entitled to the protection of the rules of natural justice and the hearing of the complaint by a fair impartial Commission not infected with bias.

By a letter dated July 1, 2021, he said that Justice Singh acknowledged receipt of his response and promised that careful consideration will be given. Notwithstanding, he added that the Commission including Gunraj and Shadick met to deliberate on the motion.

As such, the CEO contended that the participation of the Commissioners in the hearing of the motion they filed against him is a breach of the implied terms of his employment because he is entitled to a fair hearing of his response to any complaint of gross misconduct made against him.
In this regard, Lowenfield is seeking a declaration that GECOM, having determined that there shall be a hearing of the motion for his dismissal, is bound to provide him with a fair hearing including the protections of the rules of natural justice. He also wants the Court to award him costs and any further or other order it deems just in the circumstances.

Grounds for dismissal
The Commissioners have also accused Lowenfield of breaching his functions when he neglected to provide proper and lawful directions, instructions, and guidance to the officers and employees of GECOM’s Secretariat in the performance of their statutory duties during the process of the adding up of the votes recorded on the Statements of Polls (SoPs) for Electoral District Four.
According to them, this led to chaos, protests, and confusion at the GECOM Command Centre and the Office of the Returning Officer for District Four which was housed at Ashmins Building at the corner of High and Hadfield Streets, Georgetown.
The Government-nominated Commissioners alleged that the CEO, despite protests from contesting parties other than the APNU/AFC, deliberately chose to neglect the complaints of discrepancies in relation to figures declared by Region Four Returning Officer, Clairmont Mingo.
They said that he failed to adhere to a court order, issued by Chief Justice Roxane George, to prevent him from declaring the results of the election until Section 84 of the Representation of the People Act (RoPA) was complied with.
Rather, they pointed out that Lowenfield prepared a final report pursuant to Section 99 of RoPA containing all of the unverified votes as declared by Mingo, ultimately declaring the APNU/AFC as the winners of the elections.
In their motion for the CEO’s dismissal, the Commissioners detailed that he sought to have the GECOM Chair convene a meeting to approve his fraudulent numbers. Again, in breach of the orders of CJ George, they said that he failed to have Mingo comply with the statutory process and this resulted in contempt proceedings against both of them.
Throughout the process of adding up the votes for each list from the SoPs, they said that the CEO either condoned or encouraged the numerous breaches and violations of Section 84 of the (RoPA) committed by Mingo, and other election officers and staff of the Secretariat or he abdicated and abandoned his functions and duties to take the necessary steps to remedy such breaches and violations.
The motion said that on June 13, in breach of Paragraph 12 of the Recount Order, the CEO submitted a report in which he disregarded the votes cast for each of the list of candidates as established by the recount process and instead produced revised totals of votes cast after he had deducted scores of thousands of votes in favour of the PPP/C list of candidates on grounds of alleged “irregularities and anomalies”.
“In short, he failed and/or refused to produce the report as he was lawfully required to do as the CEO and instead, he was purporting to act as a Judge of the High Court hearing an elections petition,” the motion said, adding that Lowenfield not only concocted numbers but also defied several directives of the GECOM Chair. Similar motions have been tabled for the dismissal of Deputy Chief Elections Officer (DCEO) Roxanne Myers and Mingo.

Charges
A team of special prosecutors has been hired to prosecute the electoral fraud charges against Lowenfield, DCEO Myers, Mingo, GECOM clerks Denise Bob-Cummings and Michelle Miller, GECOM Elections Officer Shefern February and Information Technology Officer Enrique Livan, APNU/AFC activist Carol Joseph, and People’s National Congress Reform (PNCR) Chairperson and former Public Health Minister Volda Lawrence.
The more than 25 matters are currently before three Magistrates – Chief Magistrate Ann McLennan and Magistrates Sherdel Isaacs-Marcus and Leron Daly. Lowenfield’s report claimed that the APNU/AFC coalition garnered 171,825 votes while the PPP/C gained 166,343 votes.
How he arrived at those figures is still unknown. The certified results from the recount exercise supervised by GECOM and a high-level team from the Caribbean Community (Caricom) pellucidly showed that the PPP/C won with 233,336 votes while the coalition garnered 217,920.
The recount exercise also proved that Mingo heavily inflated the figures in Region Four – Guyana’s largest voting District – in favour of the then caretaker APNU/AFC regime.