“No reasonable basis on which APNU/AFC can claim they won more votes than PPP/C” – Dominic Gaskin

As Guyanese breathlessly await the outcome of yet another court battle, Caretaker President David Granger’s son-in-law Dominic Gaskin, a former Minister in his Government point blankly told him on Friday evening that there is no reasonable basis on which APNU/AFC can claim they won more votes than the People’s Progressive Party/Civic at the 2020 General and Regional Elections.

Gaskin in a Facebook post said that having stayed silent for the past three months while the National Recount was ongoing, he can no longer wait quietly and politely while Guyana gets “hijacked, ridiculed and torn apart.”
According to Gaskin, the coalition supporters were misled into believing that the caretaker Administration had won the election.
“No one elected us to remain in office forever. There is no reasonable basis on which you can claim to have won more votes than the PPP-C in these elections. Level with your supporters and start directing your energies towards becoming a credible opposition party in time for 2025. Above all, try to regain the trust of the swing voter. You will never win another election without their support,” he told his APNU/AFC colleagues.

Gaskin pointed out that having won the 2015 elections by a slim majority, it was never a valid assumption that the APNU/AFC would easily win the 2020 elections.
“It was always going to be tough fight. I’m no political analyst, but it’s fairly obvious that the swing vote has determined the results of the last three General Elections in Guyana. Having failed at the polls for over two decades, the PNC never commanded the electoral strength to win an election on its own, and was only able to squeeze past the PPP-C because of its alliance with the AFC,” he noted.
Moreover, the former Minister contended that there was a deliberate attempt to discredit the entire elections. Having paid close attention to the tabulated results of the 2020 elections, and having done some projections of his own, Gaskin said he knew by March 4 that a coalition victory was unlikely.
“I was aware that we had lost the East Coast Demerara sub-district by several thousand votes and the East Bank Demerara sub-district by close to one thousand votes. At the time, the Returning Officer for District Four, Mr Clairmont Mingo, had completed the tabulations for the Georgetown area, showing the coalition ahead in District Four by nearly forty thousand votes. This was clearly not enough to close the more than fifty thousand vote lead that the PPP-C had gained in the other nine electoral districts, which had already been tabulated,” he stated.
However, Gaskin said that he became “deeply suspicious” when he heard the actual numbers that the embattled RO finally declared as there was no way his numbers could have been correct.
“Much to my disappointment, the leaderships of both APNU and the AFC claimed that Mingo’s numbers were consistent with our own Statements of Poll. They also insisted that a final declaration be made on the basis of those numbers, and supported the court action to prevent a recount. The recount went ahead and the results showed clearly that Mingo’s numbers could not have been based on actual Statements of Poll. At the very least APNU+AFC’s supporters deserve an explanation from its leadership as to the basis on which they claimed to have won the election prior to the recount,” he posited.
Further, Gaskin asserted that no evidence has been provided to support the claim of vast numbers of rejected ballots among those of the disciplined services, let alone the allegation of a deliberate attempt to invalidate the votes of the disciplined services.
“The claims of fraud were grossly exaggerated and, unfortunately, designed to fool party supporters, who had placed their faith in the coalition, into believing that there was actual evidence of serious elections rigging by the PPP-C. The claim that vast numbers of disciplined services ballots were deliberately not stamped, and therefore rejected, is a case in point. The so-called intermixing stations are known, and it is a fairly simple task to sum up all the unstamped rejected ballots in those stations to support the allegation. This, however, was not done and the ominous suggestion was left to torment the minds of the men and women responsible for the defence and protection of our country and its citizens,” the former Minister surmised.
He went on to note that despite putting faith in the high-level Caricom scrutineers, in the end, the team’s report, which endorsed the elections and results of the recount as “credible”, was rejected by the coalition in favour of a “devious piece of reasoning by Chief Elections Officer Keith Lowenfield.” He further credited the Chairperson of the Guyana Elections Commission, Retired Justice Claudette Singh, for clearly instructing Lowenfield to submit his final elections report using the results of the recount.
Nevertheless, Gaskin concluded that there is no power on earth which can convince the APNU/AFC leadership that it lost the election.
“All of this leads me to a very uncomfortable conclusion. The APNU+AFC has no intention of relinquishing control of government. Five years after winning an election and gaining office with a fair amount of goodwill, the coalition is saying to the people who put us there, the equivalent of “unless and until WE are satisfied beyond a shadow of a doubt that “more votes are cast” in favour of another party in an election that WE deem credible, WE ain going nowhere”. That condition will never be satisfied,” he asserted.
Regardless, he pointed out that all that has occurred since March 4 will make it “extremely difficult” now for APNU and/or the AFC to defeat the PPP/C in 2025 elections.