THERE is a dangerous temptation to treat the 2020 elections crisis as old news, a painful chapter that is exhausting and best left behind. I urge readers to resist that impulse. Democracy cannot survive on selective memory.
Guyanese have an obligation to confront the weight of the evidence now being presented in Magistrate Faith McGusty’s courtroom. Why? It has to do with safeguarding the right of every Guyanese to cast a vote and know it will be counted, tabulated and declared honestly. Without that level of assurance, any talk of stability, progress and national confidence stands on shaky ground.
After months of hearings and scrutiny of a substantial evidential record, including sworn testimony from some 39 witnesses, election documents, official records and international observer reports, the 2023 Commission of Inquiry concluded that Guyana had witnessed “shockingly brazen attempts” to derail and corrupt the legally prescribed process for counting, ascertaining and tabulating the March 2, 2020 votes, and to obstruct a true declaration of the results.
Allow me a word for Azruddin Mohamed, whose sister and apparently second in the chain of command in the We Invest In Nationhood Party, keeps a close watch on this column. The Leader of the Opposition, currently resisting extradition to the United States in connection with a federal indictment alleging financial crimes tied to gold exports, has yet to produce a single one of his theatrical, hand-waving videos about the nine persons charged in the 2020 elections case.
No righteous monologue; no indignant demand for answers, and not a single attack on the officials accused of helping to bend the electoral process away from the votes cast by Guyanese.
It is a deafening silence from a politician who has made public outrage his political brand. One appreciates, of course, that he has been busy before the courts on his own legal matters. Still, a leader who claims to stand against wrongdoing ought not to go mute when confronted with allegations of a plot against the very democracy that placed him in office.
That brings me to Terrence Jaskaran’s evidence. Before the forensic accountant could explain his analysis last Friday, defence attorney Nigel Hughes repeatedly sought to challenge his credentials and credibility.
There is nothing improper about a defence lawyer testing a witness, and Hughes will have every right to cross-examine Jaskaran when that time comes. However, the preliminary battle over the accountant’s credentials was staged to briefly shift attention away from the evidence itself: a comparison that showed striking differences between the certified Statements of Poll and the Region Four GECOM declarations.
The Magistrate ultimately accepted Jaskaran as an expert witness. The witness is a Fellow of the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (FCCA) and a Forensic Certified Public Accountant (FCPA). As an FCCA and FCPA, Jaskaran brings senior professional accountancy standing and specialised forensic-accounting training to the examination of records, figures and documentary variances.
Jaskaran is perhaps akin to Guyana’s version of Christian Wolff (Ben Affleck) in the Hollywood movie The Accountant and its sequel, minus the autism and some very lethal combat skills. He has worked in audit and assurance since 2011 and has been a licensed practising auditor since 2015.
He has participated in Government-commissioned forensic audits involving the Sugar Industry Welfare Fund and the Guyana Passport Office, and his audit practice has undergone professional peer review in the United States and United Kingdom.
So what did Jaskaran’s comparison of certified Region Four Statements of Poll with the Form 24 declarations reveal?
The certified SoPs he examined recorded 116,215 votes for APNU+AFC. Yet the March 5 Form 24 declared 136,458, a difference of 20,243 votes.
The March 13 declaration put the figure at 136,057, still 19,842 votes above Jaskaran’s SoP-based total.
The contrast was just as consequential for the PPP/C. Jaskaran’s tabulation from the certified SoPs recorded 80,288 votes. The March 5 declaration listed 77,329, or 2,959 fewer votes; the March 13 declaration recorded 77,231, a shortfall of 3,057.
Could this have possibly been a typographical slip, rounding error or clerical footnote? Magistrate McGusty will eventually have to answer that question. Based on the final 2020 count, the electoral quota was 7,082 votes per National Assembly seat. A difference exceeding 20,000 votes represents almost three full electoral quotas, numbers large enough to matter in any serious contest for political power.
Where did those votes come from? Where did the others go? They are questions the evidence now places squarely before the court.
As Jaskaran’s testimony continues tomorrow, the prosecution’s case comes into sharper focus. And it may help to explain why defence attorney Nigel Hughes fought so hard, before the numbers could even be laid out, to challenge the credentials of the accountant presenting them.
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.