The blatant attempts by Chief Elections Officer (CEO) Keith Lowenfield and Returning Officer Clairmont Mingo to manipulate the results of the March 2 General and Regional Elections in favour of the incumbent A Partnership for National Unity/Alliance For Change (APNU/C) must be condemned by all stakeholders in the strongest possible manner.
Attorney-at-Law Sanjeev Datadin
According to People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C) candidate, Attorney-at-Law Sanjeev Datadin, the deliberate acts by these officials, who he reminded are being paid by the State, have caused Guyana to be the laughing stock of the region and the entire world.
“This is utterly ridiculous; people are looking at us and wondering what is wrong in Guyana…why is it a public official, paid by the State, is trying to fix an election for one party; and this is not a subtle thing, it is blatant,” the Attorney expressed during a virtual programme on Wednesday.
Lowenfield has been caught in a fourth attempt to alter the results of the March 2 General and Regional Elections, following his submission of a second report with doctored figures on Tuesday.
GECOM Chief Elections Officer Keith Lowenfield
The CEO submitted to the Chair of the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM), Retired Justice Claudette Singh, a report containing numbers which did not reflect those certified at the national recount which was deemed credible by a high-profile team from Caricom.
In fact, the manufactured figures included in Lowenfield’s latest report did not even correspond with the numbers he had concocted in his first report to the Chairperson. In his latest report, he sought to dump more than 115,000 valid votes and indicated a ‘victory’ for the APNU/AFC.
However, Datadin posited that there was no foundation for the numbers that Lowenfield has put out, “and that needs to be clear”.
“What he (Lowenfield) is trying to do is to actually rig an election, with the world watching; it takes some courage to blatantly rig an election,” the Attorney said.
“We had a recount and the recount figures do not match anything produced by these public officials. This is unspeakable – the wrong that they are doing,” Datadin told viewers.
“It’s almost unbelievable; every time you think the public officials involved will not be so brazen, will not be so dishonest and they are going to do the right thing, they invent a way to do the wrong thing and they proceed to do it as if everybody is unaware of what they are doing,” he added.
Several calls have since been made for Lowenfield to be suspended and for an investigation to be launched into his conduct owing to his blatant bias shown towards the APNU/AFC.
