Opposition Leader warns of criminal charges against “false accusation”, death certificates released without permission

…says GECOM should not entertain wild, unproven APNU/AFC claims

As the national election recount continues, every day sees new, unsubstantiated allegations being made by A Partnership for National Unity/Alliance For Change (APNU/AFC), allegations that Opposition Leader Bharrat Jagdeo has urged the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) to stop entertaining.

Jagdeo made this pronouncement on Saturday during a televised press conference. According to him, many of these allegations relate to questions that GECOM has long since settled, yet they are resurfacing.
“Issues that were settled two weeks ago, APNU keeps reopening these issues. All day long, they want to misapplied the instructions that have been given right at the beginning of the exercise and developed during the recount, they just want these changed.”
GECOM, he added, must not pander to APNU. “We see them doing a great deal of bending over backwards to accommodate APNU even when the issues have been clarified,” Jagdeo urged.

Others, he said, are allegations of voter fraud that come without a shred of evidence. Jagdeo noted that in the same vein that GECOM gives credence to APNU/AFC allegations of dead and migrated people having voted, GECOM should also be interested in disproving Region Four Returning Officer Clairmont Mingo’s fraudulent declaration. Instead, his controversial declaration remains in abeyance.
“The same way they are turning a blind eye, that is what we find duplicitous about GECOM. They’re turning a blind eye to an illegality that could easily be proven by documents they have in their possession, which are the SoPs and Mingo’s declarations.”
“They’re refusing to make that public, yet they’re giving minor credence to all these wild, unverified allegations from APNU,” Jagdeo said.

Criminal charges
Jagdeo, meanwhile, warned the agents making the allegations that it is a crime to make false claims of voter fraud. He said that knowingly making false accusions and the release of death certificates release without permission are criminal offences.
He also revealed that there are independent lawyers who are planning to pursue charges against such persons and noted that it will not be the political masterminds who face the charges, but the agents.
“They’re sending their agents to the counting places and it is those agents, when the Government changes, who’re going to get into trouble. Because a group of independent lawyers contacted me.”
“And they said they’re forming a team to file against all those people [who make false allegations]. And it is the ones whose names are in the counting station making false allegations who will be charged. Because there are criminal offences for what they’re doing.”

The recount of ballots cast during the March 2 General and Regional Elections has been punctuated daily with allegations of votes being cast in the name of dead persons, or persons said to have migrated.
There have been numerous reported instances of ballots being unstamped or unclear, or even a party questioning the legitimacy of its own votes; but a decision by the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) in regard to how to treat with those allegations has, in fact, not been made, though the matter has been discussed at that level.
GECOM Chairperson, Retired Justice Claudette Singh, in a public statement on Thursday, reaffirmed emphatically: “While I continue to monitor the trends based on the allegations in the Observation Reports, I am of the view that ‘he who asserts must prove’.”
Essentially, this was a call for those party agents making objections at the counting stations to “prove” that their claims are, in fact, valid.

No evidence, hearsay
GECOM Commissioner Sase Gunraj has, meanwhile, advocated during the course of the recount that it is not within the remit of GECOM to investigate the allegations being made during the recount exercise, but rather those should be addressed separately.
The public discourse over the observations comes in the wake of a confession by APNU/AFC tabulation agent Ganesh Mahipaul that the party did not, in fact, have any evidence to support its claims that persons allegedly out of the country voted on Election Day.
Mahipaul told reporters recently that the objections were being made based on “hearsay” provided by his party agents who are conducting fieldwork.
Additionally, the APNU/AFC agent, in claiming to have evidence to support the claim that a dead person had been reflected as voted, supplied the State media with a death certificate which was reproduced in the Guyana Chronicle.
Neither Mahipaul nor anyone from APNU/AFC has provided evidence that a ballot was supplied to anyone for the identified name and serial number, in light of the Chairperson’s position that “he who asserts must prove.”