THE 2020 Electoral Fraud Trial had barely begun to build momentum when it was adjourned yet again, this time for almost three weeks.
The irony is hard to miss: Guyanese endured an agonising five-month wait for the declaration of the 2020 election results, and now six years later, they are still waiting for a court to deliver accountability.
Justice delayed is justice denied. That principle must mean something to Guyanese whose votes were placed in the custody of officials legally bound to count and tabulate them honestly. The people of Guyana are entitled to know whether their ballots were tampered with, whether there was an organised effort to distort the will of the electorate, who was involved, and what end such an alleged scheme was meant to serve.
The prosecution’s roadmap has been meticulously laid out. It is an unusual case, and the threshold of evidence is much higher than that of the Commission of Inquiry. In this case, a team of defence attorneys gets the opportunity to cross-examine witnesses who are called to the stand by the prosecution.
That’s how the process works. The accused, all nine of them, three GECOM officials and five employees, along with two senior members of APNU+AFC, have a right by law to a vigorous defence.
For the last two weeks, I’ve been sitting in the Magistrate’s Court, fighting off the noise pollution from a steady stream of vehicles on Avenue of the Republic and Brickdam, to ensure I understand the evidence in chief, the cross-examination and the re-examination of witnesses.
The cross-examination of the prosecution’s witnesses often strikes me as bizarre. And I am being polite here because I don’t want to apply a North American standard to Guyana’s legal system and use the word cuckoo. Allow me to give a few examples.
Although it was well known that the witness, Terrence Jaskaran, a forensic accountant, was born in the mid-1980s, counsel for one or more of the accused asked him where he was in 1968, then 1973, 1978, and 1980. The witness replied that he was “not conscious” and, with disarming humour, that he was “not yet in my father’s consciousness.”
The line of questioning appeared designed to suggest that, because he had not personally lived through those years, he could not speak to the PNC’s documented history of rigging elections in Guyana.
But that was not the witness’ claim, nor was it the purpose of the materials before the court. Jaskaran did not purport to offer a personal recollection of earlier elections. All he apparently did was compile into a single document reports, inquiries and investigations already available in the public record.
That compilation was entirely separate from his 2021 report, which compared the certified Statements of Poll with the Form 24 declarations made on March 5 and March 13, 2020. One document assembled the historical record, while the other examined, through a comparison of official electoral documents, what occurred in the 2020 process.
Another witness, Aneal Giddings, formerly GECOM’s IT Manager, was pressed during cross-examination about the frequency of his meal and restroom breaks on a particular day more than six years ago.
He was also questioned about the ethnic composition of his team. The line of questioning startled me. I thought I had heard wrong. I didn’t. Was the attorney-at-law suggesting that ethnicity, not a person’s conduct and evidence, was the factor that determines whether officials complied with Guyana’s election laws?
Last Wednesday, police handwriting expert Ameer Mohamed returned to the witness box for cross-examination by attorney Nigel Hughes. The previous week, before Mohamed gave his evidence-in-chief, Hughes was nowhere to be found, either in court or online, to challenge his qualification as an expert witness. Principal Magistrate Faith McGusty had no recourse but to accept him as an expert.
Mohamed testified that the signatures bearing the name Volda Lawrence on passport-renewal applications from 2010, 2015 and 2020 matched the signature on the March 5 Form 24 declaration.
He did not testify that he saw Lawrence sign that document. The declaration purported to give APNU+AFC a Region Four advantage exceeding 20,000 votes above the party’s total as reflected in the certified Statements of Poll.
Whether Lawrence signed the declaration is ultimately for the court to decide. But Hughes clearly recognised the weight of Mohamed’s evidence and mounted a sustained challenge to both the discipline of forensic handwriting examination and the expert’s methodology.
He suggested that handwriting analysis amounted to little more than enlarging signatures for comparison, and attempted to insult Mohamed and the Guyana Police Force by suggesting that he had become accustomed to giving evidence in criminal proceedings without being challenged. Mohamed did not match the provocation. Calmly, he replied: “I respectfully disagree with you, counsel.”
Hughes is well aware that forensic handwriting examination is a recognised law-enforcement forensic discipline. The FBI, the RCMP and Canadian intelligence services that trained Mohamed employ hundreds of highly trained experts to interrogate thousands of documents annually.
Hughes could challenge the science of handwriting detection till the cows come home; Mohamed needs only stick to his evidence and to his conclusion.

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.