‘The shame was greater than the victory’! That sad declaration from the nationally revered Guyana-born iconic poet of the Caribbean, Martin Carter, over the declared results of the rigged August 1973 general elections in favour of the then governing and current main opposition People’s National Congress (PNC), flashed back to my memory this past week.
I had just read a local media report about the PPP/Civic representatives on the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) reaffirming a complaint they had previously been made to the bi-partisan body about the “stuffing of ballot boxes” during the November 2011 General and Regional Elections.

That illegal act had resulted in the incumbent PPP/C losing, for the first time, its customary overall parliamentary majority by a single seat in the 65-member parliament. Now a coalition of the then opposition parties – PNC (using the name APNU) and the minority Alliance For Change (AFC) — have teamed up as a combined force for the coming May 11 poll .
Members of the Guyana Defence Force and the Police Service were voting yesterday as independent Observers were preparing to be as vigilant as possible against acts of electoral fraud across the ten regions involved for the elections.
In this country 28 years of governance by the PNC, based on a culture of rigged parliamentary elections, had evolved as an institutionalised phenomenon.
Following the declared official results for the l973 poll, I had telephoned the famous poet, much loved by Guyanese across ethnicity and party politics, for a comment on the declared results of the July 17, 1973 elections for an analysis I was writing for the then privately-owned Graphic newspaper as its Chief Political Reporter.
Electoral rigging — which the PNC under the long rule of now late President Forbes Burnham had transformed into a fine political art — was to be sustained until October 1992. Then, amid the watchful eyes of independent international, regional and national observers, Guyanese were once again able to proudly point to the free casting and counting of ballots — including those of the military and police services, to confirm the restoration of electoral democracy in the nation.
Former US President Jimmy Carter’s own personal involvement had greatly enabled the valiant efforts of local human rights and other civic bodies with the PPP/C remaining ever-ready with its mass base support for the return of “free and fair elections”.
‘STUFF’ BALLOT BOXES
The conduct of elections became the sole responsibility of the independent, bi-partisan Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) to which the PPPC representatives thought it necessary to reaffirm their claim of “stuffed ballot boxes” during the 2011 national and regional elections. The current teams of independent observers must, nevertheless, be constantly vigilant.
Having covered general elections in Guyana for national/regional media since December 1964 – which was the first under Proportional Representation (PR) and the last as a colony of Britain –this journalist is conscious of the anxieties to avoid a return to the rotten political culture of electoral fraud, via ‘stuffed’ ballot boxes and in the counting and allocation of valid votes.
Anyone, Guyanese or else, and irrespective of nationality, ethnicity, religion and political preferences, with a keen interest in the history of institutionalised rigged elections in Guyana under successive PNC-led governments, could simply make use of independent sources of information, enabled by communications technology on the world-wide web, to make their own independent inquiries on the mischievous and ruthless politics of rigged elections from 1968 up to the restoration in October 1992 of supervised free and fair elections under the PPPC under a different political dispensation.
Ironically, truth is that those of who were used as pawns—either as civilians or security forces personnel—to enable rigged elections to maintain the PNC in government, would know better than either previous and current partisan political handlers how consistently and widespread were the practices to make a farce of “electoral democracy” in Guyana for almost a quarter century as then CARICOM governments remained politically paralysed!
(Rickey Singh is a noted Guyana-born Caribbean journalist based in Barbados)
Analysis by
Rickey Singh