Min. Parag Leads Testimony As 2020 Election Fraud Trial Begins
The trial about the alleged attempts to rig the country’s March 2020 General and Regional Elections in favour of the A Partnership For National Unity Government began Monday morning. Senior Magistrate Magistrate Leron Daly is presiding over the matter in the Georgetown Magistrates Court.
The case involves persons who were serving at the time in senior positions at the Guyana Elections Commission along with political figures mainly aligned to the Peoples National Congress Reform and the Alliance For Change.
The accused are PNC/R activist Carol Smith-Joseph, former Health Minister under the APNU+AFC government Volda Lawrence, former Chief Elections Officer (CEO) at GECOM Keith Lowenfield, former Deputy CEO Roxanne Myers, former Region Four Returning Officer Clairmont Mingo, and GECOM employees Sheffern February, Enrique Livan, Denise Babb-Cummings, and Michelle Miller.
They are charged with several counts of conspiring with each other to defraud the electorate by declaring a false account of votes. The offenses were allegedly committed between March 2, 2020, and August 2, 2020.
Minister of Local Government and Regional Development, Sonia Parag, an attorney and a candidate of poll for the PPP/C in the elections, testified about the alleged misconduct she observed at the GECOM Command Centre which was housed in Ashmins Building at High and Hadfield streets, Georgetown.
She was the first key witness to testify. Parag said she was present at the GECOM Command Centre to oversee the tabulation of votes for Region Four, Guyana’s largest voting district.
Her task, she explained, was to compare the numbers on her party’s Statements of Poll (SoPs) with those being announced by Mingo during the process.
Parag noted that the process was suspended when Mingo claimed he was tired. She then went on to highlight what she called discrepancies between the numbers called by GECOM staff and those on her SoPs.
According to her, votes were being added for APNU/AFC and deducted from PPP/C, and she raised objections to this loudly.
The minister recounted the chaotic scene, with various individuals, including Kwame McCoy who was also a candidate of the poll for the PPP and who now serves as Minister of Public Affairs, voicing their concerns about the integrity of the tabulation process.
The witness recounted Mc Coy shouting, “They are rigging this election!”
She described the reliance on spreadsheets instead of SoPs, despite her and other observers’ insistence on using the latter, as mandated by section 84 of the Representation of the People Act.
Minister Parag’s testimony also covered the suspension and resumption of the tabulation process, which, according to her, was slow and interrupted by claims of tiredness from GECOM staff.
She noted that only 421 of the 879 ballot boxes in District Four were counted by March 4, 2020, with the process halting entirely by early morning on March 5, 2020.
Her testimony spanned several hours, and she returned to the witness box on Tuesday, July 30, 2024. The prosecution team is being led by King’s Counsel Darshan Ramdhani.
In his opening address, he said the team would prove that there was a broad plot to inflate votes for APNU+AFC and deflate votes for PPP/C. He said the evidence would show that Mingo’s fraudulent declaration, published on GECOM’s website, was part of a coordinated effort by the defendants to rig the elections in favour of APNU+AFC.
The defendants’ lawyers, include Ronald Daniels, Eusi Anderson, and Darren Wade.
According to Lowenfield’s election report, the then-caretaker APNU+AFC coalition gained 171,825 votes and the PPP/C 166,343 votes.
The national recount of all ballots which was supervised by a high-level team from CARICOM revealed that the PPP/C won the elections having obtained 233,336 votes while the coalition garnered 217,920.
The recount also showed that Mingo allegedly inflated the votes for Region Four in favour of the APNU+AFC. GECOM sacked Lowenfield, Myers, and Mingo in August 2021.
