– Justice Singh optimistic that documents will be accounted for

By Navendra Seoraj
CHAIRPERSON of the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM), Justice (ret’d) Claudette Singh, has said that the commission intends on submitting Statements of Poll (SoPs) and Statements of Recount (SoRs) from the March 2, 2020, general and regional elections, to the High Court by Wednesday.
The High Court has given the commission, specifically the Chief Elections Officer (CEO), Keith Lowenfield, until January 29, 2021, to submit those documents. However, Justice Singh has said that they will be handed over before the deadline.
“During the week we will be handing over everything, by Wednesday,” the GECOM chairperson said during a telephone interview with the Guyana Chronicle, on Monday.

Election documents, particularly SoPs, were the subject of contention during events following the polls, as several requests by contesting parties and international organisations to view those documents were denied.
Such an outcome is, however, unlikely this time around as the High Court has ordered that those documents, which are reportedly in the possession of Lowenfield, be submitted for safekeeping, ahead of the hearing on an elections petition which was filed by petitioners on behalf of the political opposition, A Partnership for National Unity + Alliance For Change (APNU+AFC) coalition.
Chief Justice, Roxane George, SC, in striking out one of two elections petitions submitted on behalf of the political opposition, ruled last week Monday that the first petition, 88 of 2020, will be heard in the court, but agreed that, ahead of that, the SoPs and SoRs must be submitted for ‘safekeeping’.

When asked if those documents were intact and well accounted for, Justice Singh had said: “Well I would not know. We will know when we are handing them over… everything would have been stored away, and I am not the custodian, so we will know when they are checking off.

“So, I am not in a position to say that because I do not know… remember, I am not the custodian, so when the time comes, we will know.”
The chairperson had said previously that Section 102 of the Representation of the People Act, Chapter 103, states that the CEO is the ‘custodian’ of all election documents.
“He is the keeper of all those documents and he has them in his custody…I would not know where he stores them,” Justice Singh had said in a previous report.

The Chronicle understands that the SoPs and SoRs, which are to be submitted to the court, are reportedly being kept in a container, which is in the custody of Lowenfield, who, along with other GECOM officials, is facing several election fraud charges.
Although he is the sole ‘custodian’ of election documents, the CEO will have to work collaboratively with the Registrar of the Supreme Court to complete the task at hand, which is submitting the documents to the court. Section 19 of the National Assembly (Validity of Elections) Act empowers the judge in an election court to make an order for the CEO to hand those documents over to the court.
The idea of having those documents lodged at the court was ‘incited’ by attorneys, Douglas Mendes and Kashir Khan, who both requested that, in moving forward with the hearing of petition 88 of 2020, certain documents such as SoPs and SoRs, must be lodged with the registrar of the court for safekeeping.

Mendes specifically reminded the court that the Representation of the People Act allows the CEO to destroy all elections documents after a 12-month period would have elapsed. The Chief Justice agreed to the requests and granted an order for the SoPs and SoRs to be submitted to the court. There are 2, 339 Statements of Poll.
Subsequent to the March 2, 2020 elections, in the same month, High Court Judge, Franklyn Holder, had refused an application made to him for GECOM to produce SOPs for District Four. Following a slew of legal challenges and international intervention, a national recount of all votes cast was convened and the figures showed that the PPP/C received 233,336 votes while the APNU+AFC coalition got 217,920 votes.

Justice Singh, while not being privy to the SoPs and SoRs, is optimistic that, when the time comes, they will be accounted for. Both sets of documents are expected to serve as evidence when the elections petition comes up in the court for hearing.
In the first petition, 88 of 2020, petitioners Claudette Thorne and Heston Bostwick want the court to determine, among other things, questions regarding whether the elections had been lawfully conducted or whether the results had been, or might have been affected by any unlawful act or omission and, in consequence thereof, whether the seats in the National Assembly had been lawfully allocated.
Justice George has since given attorney-at-Law, Roysdale Forde, who is representing the petitioners, until February 12 to file his submissions and the respondents, including the Attorney -General, until March 19, to file submissions in reply. The parties must return to court on April 7, 2021, barring any directions by e-mail.