Magistrate to set date next year for CMC in election fraud cases

Senior Magistrate Leron Daly on Tuesday scheduled January 15, 2024 to fix a date for a case management conference (CMC), taking a step toward starting the trial into the more than two dozen fraud charges arising from the March 2020 General and Regional Elections.
During an earlier hearing on October 25, Magistrate Daly had informed lead prosecutor Darshan Ramdhani, KC, that she would not start the trial until the prosecution had arranged witness statements, exhibits, and other trial-related materials in an orderly manner.
Prosecutor Ramdhani once more provided flash drives containing certified copies of the Statements of Poll (SoPs) and Statements of Recount (SoRs), scanned documents as well as video interviews with the defendants during a hearing on Tuesday. Multiple bundles of paperwork were turned in. Following the CMC, a date will be set for trial.
The defendants are former District Four (Demerara-Mahaica) Returning Officer Clairmont Mingo; former People’s National Congress/Reform (PNCR) Chairperson Volda Lawrence; PNCR activist Carol Smith-Joseph; former Chief Elections Officer (CEO), Keith Lowenfield; former Deputy Chief Elections Officer Roxanne Myers; and Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) employees Sheffern February, Enrique Livan, Denise Babb-Cummings and Michelle Miller. They are accused of a number of offences, including misconduct while holding public office, presenting falsified documentation, and planning to manipulate Guyana’s voters by presenting an inaccurate vote total.
These charges stemmed from attempts to rig the 2020 General and Regional Elections in favour of the then-ruling APNU/AFC. These accused persons are all out on cash bail.
The prosecution has since asked the Chancellor of the Judiciary (ag), Justice Yonette Cummings-Edwards, to assign a special court to hear the cases; the court is currently awaiting her response. This, in Ramdhani’s opinion, would guarantee that the cases be tried quickly.
Regarding the prosecutor’s letter addressed to the Chancellor, Nigel Hughes, one of the defendants’ attorneys, has argued that the Chancellor is not authorized to interfere with a criminal charge proceeding before a magistrate. Prosecutor Ramdhani, however, reasoned that Section 9 of the Summary Jurisdiction (Magistrates) Act allows the Chancellor to act in this way.
Since the underlying evidence for each of these charges comes from the same source, Ramdhani had requested that the cases be consolidated during an earlier court hearing on October 3. This was in reaction to Hughes’s assessment that the proceedings would go on for a number of years because of the volume of evidence and the number of accused parties.
Hughes had suggested that the prosecution drop some charges to expedite the process, but the special prosecutor had strongly objected. The prosecution plans to call about 80 witnesses.

Concerns of unsatisfactory progress
Concerns regarding the unsatisfactory progress in these cases have been voiced by a number of persons, including Attorney General and Legal Affairs Minister Anil Nandlall, SC.
Shortly after GECOM had announced the election results on August 2, 2020, charges were brought against the individuals in question.
The trials have not started after more than three years.
The election report of former CEO Keith Lowenfield 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, since 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 highlighted that Mingo had heavily inflated the figures in Region Four (Demerara-Mahaica)— Guyana’s largest voting District — in favour of the then-caretaker APNU/AFC regime.
In August 2021, GECOM voted to terminate the employment of Keith Lowenfield, Roxanne Myers, and Clairmont Mingo. (G1)