The electoral fraud cases against former Chief Elections Officer Keith Lowenfield, former Health Minister/PNCR Chairperson Volda Lawrence, former Region Four (Demerara-Mahaica) Returning Officer Clairmont Mingo, and APNU-AFC activist Carol Joseph-Smith have been adjourned until March 25, 2022 for report.
These matters are before Chief Magistrate Ann McLennan, who presides at the Georgetown Magistrates’ Courts. At a previous hearing in August, the accused persons were served with copies of the Statements of Poll (SoPs) and Statements of Recount (SoRs) from the March 2020 Elections.
Also charged are Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) clerks Denise Bob-Cummings and Michelle Miller; GECOM Elections Officer Shefern February, and Information Technology Officer Enrique Livan.
The case for the prosecution is being led by Darshan Ramdhani, QC, while Senior Counsel John Jeremie and Attorneys-at-Law Nigel Hughes, Ronald Daniels, Konyo Sandiford, Eusi Anderson and Latoya Roberts are appearing on behalf of those charged.
Lowenfield is facing three counts of forgery and three counts of misconduct in public office. Mingo is facing four counts of misconduct in public office, while Myers has been slapped with two similar charges.
Lawrence, on the other hand, has been slapped with two charges of conspiracy to commit fraud. Joseph-Smith is charged jointly with Mingo for forgery. The GECOM clerks and IT and Elections Officers are also facing similar charges. They have all been placed on cash bail.
Besides the Chief Magistrate, Principal Magistrate Sherdel Isaacs-Marcus and Senior Magistrate Leron Daly have been assigned to deal with some of the matters.
Lowenfield’s election report claimed that the APNU-AFC coalition garnered 171,825 votes while the PPP/C gained 166,343 votes. How he arrived at those figures is still unknown, since the certified results from the recount exercise supervised by GECOM and a high-level team from the Caribbean Community (Caricom) pellucidly showed that the PPP/C won with 233,336 votes while the coalition garnered 217,920.
The recount exercise also proved that Mingo had heavily inflated the figures in Region Four (Demerara-Mahaica), Guyana’s largest voting District, in favour of the then caretaker APNU/AFC regime.
In August 2021, GECOM voted to terminate the employment contracts of Lowenfield, Myers, and Mingo. The firing of these officials was met with much satisfaction by the Government, which viewed that development as a step in the right direction to restoring public confidence in GECOM.
