By K
The National Recount of votes has proven that Region Four Returning Officer, Clairmont Mingo rigged that district’s tabulation process and, in doing so, conjured more than 15,000 ghost voters in his unsuccessful bid to secure the APNU+AFC Coalition a fraudulent victory in this year’s General Election.
Region Four Returning Officer, Clairmont Mingo
Mingo’s General Election declaration of Friday, March 13, 2020 gave the Coalition 136,057 votes, while the recount showed the correct figure to be 116,941 votes, indicating that the Returning Officer fraudulently inflated the Coalition’s Region Four total by 19,116 votes.
His declaration also gave the PPP/C 77,231 votes, when the party’s rightful total – according to recount figures – is 80,920 votes, indicating that Mingo exacted a deflation of 3,689 votes on the party.
The votes taken from the PPP/C were not enough to offset the votes given to the Coalition, hence, about 15,427 ghost votes were added by Mingo to the total number of valid votes cast. While the recount showed that 202,077 valid votes were cast in the Region Four General Election, Mingo’s declaration had taken the total up to 217, 425.
The results of the national recount tabulation show that the People’s Progressive Party has won the recount with a grand total of 233,336 votes against the APNU+AFC Coalition’s 217,920 votes; Mingo had caused the victory to sway in the other direction, giving APNU+AFC 236,990 votes to the PPP/C’s 229,489 votes.
Kaieteur News has produced verifiable reports, demonstrating Mingo’s manipulation of votes in 32 ballot boxes from the East Bank of Demerara. Our analysis of those boxes shows that Mingo’s tabulation subtracted 391 votes from PPP/C, and added 1,514 votes to APNU+AFC. This amounted to a total variance of 1,905 votes from the corresponding Statements of Poll – the other 13000 plus ghost votes were scattered over what would have had to been at least dozens of ballot boxes.
The paper’s analysis is based on audio recordings, provide by The Citizenship Initiative (TCI) and A New and United Guyana (ANUG), of Mingo’s General Election numbers being called out during the Kingston tabulation, and figures supplied for four ballot boxes by the Head of the Organization of American States (OAS) Observer Mission, Bruce Golding, in the mission’s preliminary report on Guyana’s 2020 Elections to the OAS Permanent Council.
Chart showing the Mingo-impacted outcome of the Guyana General Election against the actual outcome
Background
Allegations that there might be attempts to rig the elections began mid-March shortly after the contentious pair of declarations of the Region Four results by Mingo was ruled as unlawful by Chief Justice Roxane George-Wiltshire.
A slew of circumstances had halted the tabulation and when it resumed, Mingo returned with a spreadsheet, which showed numbers while observers and party representatives did not see inputted onto the spreadsheet.
Though there was much protest over this, especially by the PPP, Mingo had gone ahead and made declarations based on those figures. The PPP challenged the declarations for the general and regional elections in Court and successfully got them vitiated.
The Chief Justice had sent Mingo back to the table, after she found that he did not stick to the law on the procedure necessary for the count. The illegality that occurred, according to the Court, is that Mingo did not allow the persons entitled to witness the process the opportunity to observe when he placed the figures from the statements of poll on to the spreadsheet, if he did that at all.
It did not help the situation when the second general and regional declarations for Region Four, made on March 13, also followed a tabulation marred by a lack of transparency and accusations of electoral fraud. Five of the contesting political parties had reported to Kaieteur News that Mingo produced inflated statements of poll, with numbers that were clearly clumsily doctored.
Political parties reported that the statements of poll were projected in such a way that they could not ascertain the veracity of the numbers or the authenticity of the documents. Observers and political parties reported that when they asked Mingo to view the security features on the statements of poll, they were rejected.
Nevertheless, Mingo made a second pair of declarations of the Region Four General and Regional Elections results, which did not command enough public confidence for GECOM to consider them at the time for the announcement of the official elections results.
Mingo’s first pair of declarations was at odds with his second pair, but the governing coalition did not appear to care for that and signed off on the declarations both times. Joseph Harmon, APNU+AFC campaign co-chair had revealed that the party hoped its presidential candidate, David Granger, would be sworn in quickly.
That did not happen, as calls began to mount, particularly from the international community, for a fair and credible conclusion to the electoral process. Though attempts were made by an APNU+AFC candidate, Ulita Moore to prevent the recount, GECOM finally managed to get the recount underway, and it has exposed his manipulation.
