APNU/AFC’s Elections Campaign Manager, Joseph Harmon, is continuing with his outrageous claims that “electoral fraud” was committed by the Peoples Progressive Party Civic (PPP/C) during the March 2 elections.
Moving from an assertion that “irregularities” had resulted in 89,000 votes being impacted he raised this to 92,000 in a letter to GECOM claiming that the latter body was not responsive to “at least 11 letters” in which he detailed his assertions.
However, for the first time, he made several specific assertions that presented the opportunity for his statements to be fact-checked. For instance, he claimed that “in ballot box 7079, 352 ballots were issued but 377 discovered in the ballot boxes at the recount.” However, a cursory check of the actual statement of the ballot box in question shows that actually 227 votes were recorded at the SOR.
Similarly, Harmon claims that a wrong list was found in Ballot Box 7003 but again if the observation report is checked, it would show that ballot box 7002 was brought out instead of 7003.
It is not surprising that GECOM has refused to respond to Harmon’s overheated rhetoric which is based on outrageous assertions bereft of any grounding in fact.
Meanwhile, the PPP/C in a statement on Saturday afternoon said that the increasingly embattled APNU/AFC Coalition persists in its misguided attempts to discredit the electoral process by perpetuating fallacious claims about so-called irregularities.
Time and time again, these claims have been exposed as blatant lies being told to the Guyanese people.
It noted that the latest such claim was detailed in a May 30, 2020 report published by Demerara Waves, headlined ‘APNU accuses GECOM of ignoring letters about PPP’s “glaring” electoral fraud’.
“The Coalition’s Joseph Harmon, today, made outrageous and false claims about “electoral fraud” by the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) in Regions 7 and 8. It must be noted that the Coalition, based on the declaration of election results prior to the commencement of the national recount, won these two regions at both the General and Regional levels,” the PPP/C said adding that Harmon made specific claims about electoral fraud in Region 7, but these have been exposed as lies.
“First, he claimed that in Ballot Box 7079, a total of 352 ballots were issued, but 377 ballots were found in the Ballot Box. However, the Statement of Recount for Ballot Box 7079, Phillipai Primary School, make it clear that there were not 377 ballots in the Ballot Box; rather there were 227 votes cast – 223 being deemed valid and four being rejected ballots,” the PPP/C said. The party added that secondly, he claims that in Ballot Box 7003, the wrong list of electors was found in the box. “However, the Observation Report for Ballot Box 7003 explains that Ballot Box 7002 was brought out, instead of Ballot Box 7003 and this “resulted in a mix up” that was corrected. The Observation Report also said, “No other error was found in this box.”
Further, the party said that what troubling is that Harmon stated that the Police Commissioner, who is the Chief Immigration Officer, has confirmed that people who migrated voted at the March 2020 Elections. This is so, especially in light of the fact that the PPP has found scores of people currently in Guyana, who were named by the Coalition as having migrated.
