No repeat of 2020 election saga – GECOM Chair

Chairperson of the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) Justice (retired) Claudette Singh has assured the public that there will not be a repeat of the 2020 elections controversies.

“We would not have that kind of saga,” she told reporters on Monday.

For one, she noted that stakeholders “would be more vigilant”. Additionally, she pointed out that unlike in 2020, the Statements of Polls (SOPs) would be published on GECOM’s website so everyone can see.

SOPs are the official record of the results of the elections at each polling station. In fact, the presiding officer must clearly announce the results of the elections as recorded in the SOPs. The presiding officer is also required to retrieve one each of the first leaves of the SOPs for General and Regional Elections and post them securely in a conspicuous location outside of the polling station. In addition, these critical documents will be uploaded to GECOM’s website to be publicly viewed.

Chief Elections Officer (CEO) Vishnu Persaud on Monday commented that the 2025 elections results “can be known even before we declare it” as a result of this transparent system.

In 2020, during the tabulation of the votes for Region Four (Demerara-Mahaica), there was a deviation from the use of the SOPs. Instead, certain GECOM officials began to tally numbers from a spreadsheet – numbers which were vastly different from those recorded by other political parties and stakeholders observing the proceedings.

To this day, the Peoples National Congress (PNC)-led A Partnership For National Unity and Alliance For Change (AFC) have maintained that the SOPs in their possession were in alignment with the inaccurate announcements being made by the certain GECOM officials but to date, they have refused to release those documents as proof.

Recently, Samuel Sandy, APNU/AFC’s Campaign Manager-Operations for the East Coast of Demerara (ECD) during the 2020 General and Regional elections, revealed that the evidence he had collected directly contradicted the results that had been read out by then Region Four Returning Officer Clairmont Mingo, now one of nine charged for electoral fraud.

“I was responsible for collecting all SOPs (Statements of Poll). And I did take it upon myself to record the scores of every SOP received…I took pictures. I kept them. I still have them. I went to the Ashmin’s Building. I listened to the numbers being tabulated. I looked at my numbers and thought to myself, where might this be going?” Sandy recently recounted.

Nine individuals are currently before the court in connection with the March 2020 general and regional elections, among them senior former Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) officials.

The accused include Mingo, former Chief Elections Officer (CEO) Keith Lowenfield, and his former Deputy Roxanne Myers. Also charged are former PNC/R Chairperson Volda Lawrence, PNC/R activist Carol Smith-Joseph, and former GECOM employees Sheffern February, Enrique Livan, Michelle Miller, and Denise Babb-Cummings.

The election report of former CEO Lowenfield had claimed that the APNU/AFC coalition garnered 171,825 votes, while the People’s Progressive Party/Civic (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 CARICOM pellucidly showed that the PPP/C won with 233,336 votes, while the coalition garnered 217,920.

The recount exercise also highlighted that Mingo had heavily inflated the figures in Region Four – Guyana’s largest voting district — in favour of the then-caretaker APNU+AFC regime.

Meanwhile, according to the GECOM Chair, the Secretariat is working “very hard” to put the necessary systems in place for a transparent and credible electoral process.

“We have been looking at a lot of, many matters, and we are putting things in place,” she noted.

In fact, she affirmed that both statutory and legislative safeguards have improved since 2020, noting that international technical assistance is also being provided to bolster voter education and operations.

“Well, we have separate persons working with operations. We have somebody who is working with, well, generally, you know, like to assist us in, well, putting out more information. You will find a lot of information going on. Yes, civic and voter regulation, and you will find information going on as well,” she said.

Further, when asked about criticism of her leadership and perceived bias based on her voting patterns, Singh was direct “I am not political bias. I’ve never been biased.”
“Voting pattern is a different thing. I vote on positions,” she added.

However, Singh acknowledged flaws in the structure of the Commission itself, particularly the reliance on the casting vote by the Chair, which has often been at the centre of political contention.

“I do not think a casting vote should be in place. That is something that needs constitutional reform. We need to revamp the commission with a different structure,” she said, suggesting Guyana could examine alternative models from other countries.