–Jagdeo says

VICE-PRESIDENT Dr. Bharrat Jagdeo on Friday said that it is time to put on record how events unfolded during the 2020 General and Regional Elections, and the efforts made by the People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C) to stop these attempts which involved a number of persons.

The Vice-President made these remarks on Friday during a press conference held at the Arthur Chung Conference Centre, where he noted that there were several events before the March 2, 2020 elections that all played a role in the attempt to rig the polls.

During the press conference, Dr. Jagdeo noted that it was around the same time some three years ago that the PPP/C knew it had won the elections. This was based on the analysis of all the Statements of Poll collected.

The opposition APNU+AFC camp, he said, was at the time in full panic mode, based on the intelligence they were able to gather at the time. As such, he noted that the Opposition camp decided to trigger what they had always intended, which was their alleged plot to rig the elections.

However, he stated that in retrospect, there were a number of events that were a part of the Opposition’s alleged plan to compromise the elections in the lead-up to March 2, 2020.

Some of these events, he said, included the former administration’s attempt to “digitise” the records at the General Registrar’s Office.

From intelligence gathered, he said, this digitisation process was intended to add people to the database at the GRO, and issue fraudulent birth certificates to them and subsequently have them registered to vote during the elections period.

He said that this was followed by the unilateral and illegal installation of a Chairman at the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM), while the third exercise was the commencement of an illegal house-to-house registration process.

Dr. Jagdeo noted that the idea behind this, from all information gathered, was to not register substantial blocks of persons within PPP support areas. With this, the period to make claims to have those persons added to the list would have been too short, and as such, many persons would have been disenfranchised.

Added to this, he noted that other moves included having the Region Four Returning Officer’s office stationed in the same building as the GECOM secretariat, which was reportedly not done in other regions.

He said: “But that was a precursor to the events that unfolded three years ago in the immediate post-election period. I think it’s time we put this on record now; how we saw these events, in real-time, and what we were doing to minimise the impact, or nullify their effectiveness, that is the effectiveness to rig the elections.”

According to the Vice-President, this plot involved a number of actors, with the APNU+AFC coalition at the centre of it. Other elements included the Police Force and other organisations, he added.