Make no mistake, there was a reprehensible conspiracy to rig the March 2, 2020 elections in Guyana. Hopefully very soon, the terms of reference would be laid out and an international commission of inquiry would be appointed to identify what happened and who were responsible, and to recommend ways and means to ensure that the shameless events surrounding the attempt to rig the March 2, 2020 elections would never again happen in Guyana. We need the commission of inquiry now, without too much delay. But even as we await the appointment of the commission of inquiry, other things need to be done. Changes in GECOM are an imperative.
Three GECOM Commissioners have submitted a motion for the removal of the Chief Elections Officer, the Deputy Chief Elections Officer, and the Returning Officer for Region 4. The Chair of GECOM has written to all three persons to show cause why GECOM should not terminate their services. For the vast majority of the Guyanese people, including many who did not vote for the PPP, the termination of the contracts for these three persons should have been done a long time ago. For those who observed Guyana’s elections, this is the natural consequence for persons who recklessly – in full view of the whole world – tried to change the election results. Serving and past Prime Ministers from CARICOM saw with their own eyes the attempt to manipulate the results. It was mind-boggling to see how brazen the attempt was, and it was shocking for them to see that the then incumbent Government, the then incumbent President, the then incumbent Prime Minister gave tacit endorsement to the effort to rig the results.
Finally, GECOM has made a move to address the presence in the management leadership of persons who were actively engaged in election skullduggery between March 3 and August 2, 2020. There is no doubt among objective persons in and out of Guyana that there was a conspiracy to rig the March 2020 elections’ results. There is unanimous agreement among certified observers that there was an attempt to manipulate the elections results. Clearly, the persons leading the manipulation were the most senior people in management in GECOM – the Chief Elections Officer, the Deputy Elections Officer and the Returning Officer for Region 4. All these officers are now in Court facing serious charges for fraud and conspiracy to change the elections’ results.
I know leaders of APNU/AFC were part of the conspiracy. I know they were among the intellectual authors. Whether or not Lowenfield, Myers and Mingo were part of the authorship I do not know, but they were the ones who were the implementers of the reprehensible scheme to manipulate the results of the elections in Region 4, which would have changed the overall national results. And they were aided and abetted by other players in GECOM.
Unfortunately, Vincent Alexander and two other GECOM commissioners, at the very least, stood by and gave a pass to those trying to manipulate the elections’ results. In the face of a motion to remove the three leading persons in the aborted attempt to rig the results, Vincent Alexander has come out insisting that there is only one reason for the motion – it was motivated by race. According to him, the GECOM commissioners who placed the motion have absolutely no basis to request that the contracts for the Chief Elections Officer and his colleagues be terminated. Alexander pretends nothing happened, there was no attempt to rig the results. This is the same Alexander who voted for, and diligently worked to achieve, the dismissal of Mr. Boodhoo, the then Chief Elections Officer, because of a miscalculation of seats in the 2011 elections. There was no attempt to change the election results, and Boodhoo corrected the seat allocation at the same meeting during which he presented the results to GECOM. But it was enough to fire him.
Now we have three GECOM senior staff who brazenly and shamelessly tried to change the elections’ results by altering the numbers in the Statements of Poll, and when that did not work, Lowenfield tried to remove more than 115,000 votes as votes from phantoms and dead people. Even as they were doing that, people showed up and exposed them. These persons were not phantoms, and they did not arise from their graves. For Alexander, these things did not happen. What the world thought they saw was just an illusion; these things that the media in Guyana documented each day, even the media that is normally anti-PPP, is another fake story. What the EU, Caricom, the OAS, the Carter Center, the local Private Sector, and several new political parties saw and rejected was just a figment of their imagination. what the courts, including the Caribbean Court of Justice, rejected never happened.
It had to be only one thing behind the motivation to fire Lowenfield, Myers and Mingo – their race. The majority of the GECOM management staff and the majority of the persons working at GECOM are from one ethnic group in Guyana. No one is firing all of them; the only ones are those fingered in the rigging of elections’ results while being live streamed. It is shameful, and Alexander is shameless.
