The electoral fraud cases against Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) Deputy Chief Elections Officer Roxanne Myers will continue on August 3, 2021, when the matters are set to be called for reports before Senior Magistrate Leron Daly at the Georgetown Magistrates’ Courts.
In February last, Magistrate Daly ruled that a Preliminary Inquiry (PI) would be conducted into the two counts of misconduct in public office against Myers. This means that the presiding Magistrate will now conduct a PI to determine whether there is sufficient evidence to commit Myers to stand trial at the High Court.
It is alleged that between March 4 and 14, 2020, at High and Cowan Streets, Kingston, Georgetown, while being a public officer, that is to say, the Deputy Chief Elections Officer of the GECOM, Myers wilfully misconducted herself together with Region Four Returning Officer Clairmont Mingo and others, to declare a fraudulent account of votes for the Regional and General Elections of the March 2, 2020 General and Regional Elections, the said misconduct amounting to a breach of the public’s trust in the office of the said Returning Officer for District Four of GECOM, without any reasonable excuse or justification.
Myers has not been required to plead to the indictable charges. She was released on $300,000 bail.
The Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) has hired a team of special prosecutors to prosecute the electoral fraud cases against Chief Elections Officer (CEO) Keith Lowenfield, DCEO Myers, Mingo, GECOM clerks Denise Bob-Cummings and Michelle Miller, GECOM Elections Officer Shefern February and Information Technology Officer Enrique Livan, APNU/AFC activist Carol Joseph, and People’s National Congress Reform (PNCR) Chairperson and former Public Health Minister Volda Lawrence.
The more than 25 matters are currently before three Magistrates – Chief Magistrate Ann McLennan and Magistrates Sherdel Isaacs-Marcus and Leron Daly. Lowenfield’s 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. 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 heavily inflated the figures in Region Four – Guyana’s largest voting District – in favour of the then caretaker APNU/AFC regime.
