THREE days before 757,690 registered Guyanese voters decide whether to stick with the ruling alliance on the basis of its performance in the past five years or dump it in favour of any of the opposition, mainstream and minority media personalities and social media influencers continue to outdo each other, racing against time and hoping to belatedly influence late deciders.
It would be mind-boggling to think that even first-time voters will not have made their minds up three days before casting ballots, but the Online competitors for attention and ‘likes’ are holding on to and grabbing at every opportunity to create new sensational headlines suggesting which party is likely to win or lose.
Storms are brewed in teacups and mole hills get built into mountains as the Online vloggers, bloggers and broadcasters compete for the electorate’s attention in all of the 83,000 square-mile (616,000 square kilometer) nation’s three counties and ten regions.
And the savant political competitors are nothing but enjoying the free propaganda rides.
A popular former official in the major opposition party (whose real name is same as the most popular British actor to play Hollywood’s ‘Agent 007’) crossed the floor to the ruling party and alliance, and was subjected to racial attacks, accused by former colleagues of making himself “a slave catcher”.
Take another case: Before the election date was announced, the rich leader of the smallest new party challenging the country’s two oldest political parties and their respective national alliances was better known as a rich kid showing off ownership of several top-dollar luxury vehicles obtained from his family’s long association with gold exports.
But recently, he and his father were formally sanctioned by Washington for allegedly defrauding taxpayers of over US$50 million in payments for undeclared gold exports from Guyana.
Now, largely thanks to use of excessive Online imaging, a political leader who shies away and is hidden from the regional international press has attracted more attention on the information super-highway than if he’d followed traditional house-to-house campaigning rules.
All the parties live Online as well, but some fair observers not in the polling race argue the smaller party’s leader benefitted naturally from the excessive PR gained from the criticisms sent his way by both the ruling and opposition parties, and their respective spokespersons.
Such observers argue the major parties may have mistakenly treated an initial distraction like a major threat, adding silver to his gold-plated political and campaign proclamations.
His savvy use of the Internet was also highlighted when he posted a handshake with the nation’s army chief on the day soldiers and police officers voted (a week before polling day) on his several platforms, silently inferring the smiling army chief supported his party.
The army chief naturally responded with understanding disgust, but the usual suspect bloggers claimed he might have been politically pressured by the State and the ruling party.
But perhaps the biggest effort to influence voters came through what was presented as an official survey by persons said to be associated with the University of Guyana (UG), which offered results indicating likelihood of ‘a hung parliament’, in which the opposition might have more seats than now, but not enough to govern.
Initial reading by the uninitiated led to many netizens, bloggers and voters fully swallowing the statistical conclusions, many already speculating about what another hung parliament will mean for the ruling alliance after it governed with the opposition having a one-seat majority in a parliament elected through Guyana’s unique Proportional Representation (PR) in the 2011-2015 term.
Anti-government and ruling party/alliance bloggers spent an entire day harvesting what they thought was crystal-clear proof that today’s government will no longer have the power it now enjoys after Monday’s poll.
But that glee lasted only 24 hours.
The results of the ‘survey’ were announced in a letter to the Kaieteur News newspaper on Thursday, August 27, but by Friday morning another letter appeared in the State-owned Guyana Chronicle, penned by a named ‘Professor Emeritus’ who “taught social science research methods and statistics for over 25 years”.
The respondent started his reply letter with the cautionary adage — ‘Statistics don’t lie; liars use statistics!’ — to bore deep holes into everything from the methods employed by the said surveyors, to the size of the sample and absence of necessary explanatory data to validate the demographic-based findings.
The responding writer also concluded – from the beginning – that “Quite often,” the adage he opened his letter with “also helps remind people of the GIGO (Garbage in, Garbage Out) statistical analytical claptrap.”
In other words, he added, “If you put incomplete, inaccurate or biased data into the computer, you get false (bogus) results – or, simply put: ‘garbage’ for results.”
But while the authors of the ‘survey’ were associated with the nation’s university, the poll was funded by what they described as ‘a private New York-based corporation currently exploring investment opportunities in the country.’
But the respondent wrote: “The obfuscation of who funded the polling is questionable, if not suspicious, since investors don’t use polling data to tell them what areas are best for investment.”
“Instead,” he argued, “they rely on demographic ‘economic impact analyses’, a method commonly utilised by economists to provide reliable and valued information on preferable areas for investments.”
The respondent, with a PhD in teaching social sciences and analytical surveys, also bored deep holes into everything else tabled for public consumption by the university students accredited with the findings, inviting replies to questions on who was the lead researcher (supervisor), the researching students’ background and who trained them, the period the survey was done – and why that basic information was not included in the published account of ‘findings’.
The surveyors claimed their sample base was 4,900 persons, but the respondent noted that surveys are usually kept at a maximum of 1,000 to 1,500 individuals, to minimize possibilities of large margins of error and “ensure more accurate and meaningful results.”
So, with two days left for E-Day, the sorry media show continues!

DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Guyana National Newspapers Limited.