…coalition says persons also did not submit Certificates of Employment

MORE and more anomalies are being unearthed as the recount of the votes cast at the General and Regional Elections progresses.

On Tuesday, as the Elections Secretariat processed a Ballot Box (6346) from the Corriverton Primary School, it was discovered that 10 persons who were not listed on the Official List of Elector (OLE) voted without submitting their Certificates of Employment (COEs). According to the Observation Report that was generated at the level of the workstation, there was a single Certificate of Employment within Ballot Box 6346; however, the Poll Book had no record of it.

The absence of such crucial document, Minister Amna Ally said, amounts to electoral fraud, explaining that if a person’s name is not listed on the OLE at a particular Poll Station, he or she must produce a Certificate of Employment, before they he/she be allowed to vote. “If there is no Certificate of Employment, then something went wrong,” Minister Ally said, while noting that such irregularity cannot be ignored. According to her, there is a clear trend.

“This is being repetitive. A lot of it is being found across the country, and particularly in Region Six. It is happening primarily in the PPP/C support area,” Minister Ally told the Guyana Chronicle. Minister Ally is a senior functionary with the A Partnership for National Unity + Alliance for Change (APNU+AFC) coalition.

Additionally, it was found that of the 21 Oaths of Identity that were in the Ballot Box, only 11 were recorded in the Poll Book. Ally told Guyana Chronicle that there have been cases in which the Oaths of Identity were missing, in addition to other critical documents that ought to have been in the ballot boxes. Added to that, she said the coalition has found cases in which persons voted in the place of the dead or persons who were out of Guyana when the General and Regional Elections were held on March 2. The National Recount, she contended, is confirming that the electoral procedures were breached, particularly in People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C) dominated areas.

“Fraud committed by the PPP/C was done at all levels and of various kinds. We have found hundreds of people not voting with the Oath of Identity when they know that if you don’t present an ID card you have to take an Oath,” Ally explained. The failure by Presiding Officers to stamp the ballots, and stamp them correctly remains a burning issue, the APNU+AFC Official said, explaining that there have been cases in which ballots were deemed rejected because they were unstamped or were not stamped correctly.

Such was also the case on Tuesday when 26 ballots for the General Elections were reportedly rejected for want of the official mark – the six digit number, while 26 ballots for the Regional Elections, in the same box, had two stamps – one on the left side and on the right side. It is believed that the Assistant Presiding Officer, who stamped the ballots, folded the ballots incorrectly causing the regional end to be stamped twice, and the general end of the ballots to have no stamp.

According to Ally, many of the unstamped ballots were found in APNU+AFC stronghold areas. She said what is clear is that the PPP/C employed a variety of “fraud tactics” in the different locations. The APNU+AFC has cited more than 1,200 cases in which persons voted for either the deceased or individuals who were out of the country but the PPP/C, in response, has published on its Facebook Page videos with several persons indicating that they had voted on March 2 and were not dead or out of the jurisdiction on Elections Day.
So support its claims, the APNU+AFC has furnished the Guyana Elections Commission with a number of death certificates. “We have Death Certificates, and apart from the Death Certificates, all GECOM has to do is to request from GRO who are dead. We don’t have to make up that. How do you make up that someone is dead? That is unheard of. If the person is dead, the person is dead, and if the person voted, that is one of the kinds of fraud that the PPP/C employs,” Ally said as she dismissed the videos published by the main Opposition party.

Aside from the provision of Death Certificates, the Immigration Department has confirmed that 83% of the persons listed by the APNU+AFC on a list of 207 were out of the jurisdiction on March 2, and therefore could not have voted.

In general, the APNU+AFC has contended that more than 2,000 anomalies have affected approximately 90,000 votes, and have placed on the line, the credibility of the General and Regional Elections.

Last weekend, APNU+AFC Campaign Manager, Joseph Harmon, demanded that the irregularities be thoroughly investigated by the Elections Commission.

“We cannot sail calmly into the end of the recount while your concerns go unanswered and a massive fraudulent operation carried out on your electoral process. An operation which is systemic and pervasive,” Harmon said as he called the Electorate to action. Based on the coalition’s examination of the anomalies, it concluded that Districts One, Seven, Eight and Nine were specifically targeted for special operations by the PPP/C.

Zooming in on Region Seven (Cuyuni-Mazaruni) and Region Eight (Potaro-Siparuni), Harmon pointed to a number of ballot boxes in which there were glaring irregularities. “For example in ballot box 7079 – 352 ballots were issued one day, yet 377 were discovered in the box at the recount. In ballot box 7024, fifty (50) counterfoils were missing from the ballots issued. This means that fifty (50) ballots have been casted elsewhere. Similar occurrences were found in ballot box 7003, where the wrong list of electors was found in the box,” he detailed.

Harmon further pointed out that “in box 7060 the list of electors ticked off for another station was found in this box,” while adding that there were seven (7) ballots cast in excess of the list and any other procedure which would allow it. APNU+AFC, he said, has also taken note of what it describes as the “flagrant misuse” of oaths of identity, in which persons voted without any identification and without evidence of an oath of identity. According to Harmon, there were 326 such cases identified in 27 ballot boxes.
During the period May 26-28, the coalition, while participating in the recounting of votes from District Eight, uncovered 83 cases in which persons without ID cards and oath of identity were allowed to vote.

The alleged case of unstamped ballots cast by members of the Disciplined Services remains another outstanding issue the Elections Commission must address, Harmon submitted. “My fellow Guyanese as you can see our intervention with GECOM has been based on evidence and we require GECOM to act in a timely manner on these investigations as the cumulative impact of these irregularities and fraud has a bearing on the validity of all votes. The qualitative figure so impacted is now in excess of 92, 000,” Harmon said in his public address while calling on GECOM to wake up.