Dear Editor,
HAVING read Stabroek News’ editorial and Freddie’s Kaieteur column, both dated 18 May, 2020, I wish to proffer one overlooked aspect of the elections which has resulted in the current election standoff. While indeed what occurred post-elections appears unbelievable, little-known machinations which took place before and on elections day will allow readers to better appreciate the weaknesses that lie at the heart of these elections, points

somewhat surprisingly missed by both Stabroek and Freddie. Although difficult to believe, these behind-the-scenes subterfuges are not different from the scale, magnitude and skill of corruption seen in Guyana over the last decade and a half. It is for those reasons only one person was convicted in Guyana for wanton abuse of state resources, the GRDB accountant who was deported back to Guyana from Canada. But, other than him, the absolute ingenuity and masterful execution, has led to few others barely being charged, save and except for two former government ministers.

Before going on to elaborate what happened prior to the elections, one needs to take account of the calculated and cunning strategy to prevent a new voter-registration exercise which was built for the start of 2019 with a publicly known large budgetary allocation to arrive at a clean list. If anyone wanted to prevent this from happening they would find a way destabilise the governance arrangements of a country and to limit the time possible for the execution of a full-blown voter-registration task. Conceptualising a no-confidence motion to have new elections within three months is one such way to do it. Then if not followed to the letter, vehemently oppose having a cleaned-up list in the lead-up to the elections to ensure a ballooned list remains. One of those highly concurrent cunning practices which could happen in the lead-up to a no-confidence motion and thereafter is the matter of fake national identification cards to leverage on a bloated list.

ID card machines are easy to procure and are done so over the counter worldwide, making duplicate ID cards rather easy to print. Like a U.S.-dollar counterfeit machine, an ID card machine is a tad smaller, roughly six inches by six inches, and are popularly used by companies producing workplace badges or ID cards, both here and abroad. The smallness of Guyana and its low GDP per capita makes GECOM secretariat staff a ripe opportunity for the picking; in so doing, an electronic copy of the entire list of 650,000 persons is easy to come by. Once an elections date is announced and the printed Official List of Electors (OLE) becomes available, or even with the preliminary list of electors (PLE), parties, using their respective local community members, conduct their physical house-to-house verification exercise with a printed list. It therefore becomes easily known who are currently living in Guyana and easily available to vote, but more importantly, those who have migrated and who are dead, with a small error for tolerance.

Parties then collate the data and assemble a list of migrated and dead voters from the very bloated 650,000-person OLE. A simple electronic connection to an ID card machine then has the capacity to print any number of ID cards of those no longer alive or in Guyana. That number can be anywhere up to about 50,000 at minimum to make it economical and widely distributed. Party agents can easily spend just about a week going through that list of the dead and migrated, disaggregated by polling places and respective communities, to match the biodata of similar persons to those alive and present in Guyana and to ensure these freshly minted fake IDs cards are done in parties’ respective strongholds. Cards are then centrally kept and given to key party personnel on elections day. These key party representatives would have already, even a year or more, relocated to respective regions of Guyana to become familiar with the local communities and to know who are capable to conducting multiple voting on elections day, and to corroborate the migrated and dead persons on the list.

On elections day, armed with these fake IDs, key party agents then pass them out to similarly biodata- matched persons on the list in various communities by polling place, with the lure of a lucrative financial incentive per card, for them to vote in communities other than their own. In a 12-hour voting period, an individual can easily traverse different distances to vote at least five times at different polling places in their party strongholds, wearing multiple, different clothing. Inked fingers can easily be pre-oiled for subsequent bleach removal. In party strongholds, some GECOM staff are comfortable with that political plan and would quickly confirm that fake ID, despite the contrary. The photograph on Guyana’s national ID cards, which one would think holds the key to rid multiple voters, is widely known to be of a poor quality, and many are about 10 years old and not very recognisable. If doubts arise at the place of poll by a party agent or GECOM, fake voters would remark that was 10 years ago, naturally many persons’ appearances would have changed.

Figures bandied about for fake ID voting can average US$100 or GY$20,000 per vote. To achieve 50,000 extra votes one only needs just about US$1million, easily obtainable from a nefarious underground business enterprise who has benefitted from past corrupt practices or is promised payback after an elections victory. An average of 10,000 persons using fake IDs just needed to vote five times each, distributed across favourable polling communities. So for instance with an OLE of about 650,000 averaging 278 persons per the 2339 polling booths, one party with say about half (1100) favourable polling areas only need about 45 extra votes per favourable polling area to give it 50,000 votes without going over the total OLE at each polling place.

In other words, with an OLE of 650,000 bloated by about 40% (260,000 extra), a run on the elections machinery can take as many as 50,000 votes mostly unnoticed with this practice (the eventual vote count was about 450,000). Observers, and other parties’ polling agents not engaging in this practice, would hardly notice any irregularity. They can thus easily and quite understandably say the elections were fair and clean, not having picked up this elaborate and artistic level of corruption and deception, not unheard of before in Guyana. It is understood that this practice could have occurred in the past on a smaller scale, with a dry run done as recent as say our less important local government elections.

As the ongoing electoral recount will pick up other irregularities I have not touched on, such as more elaborate corroboration or collusion of GECOM officials with specific parties, missing documentation, irregular tabulation and other contorted practices, the current exercise is one of futility. Sadly it cannot unearth fake ID card voting which can significantly distort a vote count. The only solution to have fair and transparent elections in the circumstances in which we find ourselves with the poor electoral laws and room for manipulation, is to have new elections with a fresh, new house-to-house registration exercise to remove the extra padding of the electoral list and limit the room for fake ID card voting.

In doing so, the two major parties along with some of the smaller parties should agree to an interim government comprising representatives of these parties, for a period of about a year until a new list is established and elections are ready to go ahead.
Regards,
Krishna Persaud