AFC demands postponement of Local Gov’t Elections in light of irregularities

The Alliance For Change (AFC) is again demanding a postponement of the Local Government Elections (LGE) until the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) can ensure that the official List of Electors is purged of contaminants and fraud. The current list of electors being promoted as the list for the LGE is not clean.

The party said, if recent reports of fraud blatantly committed in the process of submitting documents to GECOM for parties to qualify for the upcoming LGE are anything to go by, they confirm that the List of Electors held up by GECOM to be safe, secure and sacrosanct is far from being so.

“It is astonishing that despite the national embarrassment of fraudulent activities revealed during the national recount exercise, agents of the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) have continued in their corrupt act to forge and abuse the names of the deceased and migrated in the composition of the current list of electors.”

The party said Guyanese are still traumatised by the revelation that persons, who had legitimately migrated by March 2, 2020, voted in several polling stations during the March 2020 general elections. The disclosure then also showed an assortment of outright fraud, evasion of standard practices and the deliberate ignoring of electoral procedures to steal the election.

The pious apology from the PPP’s General Secretary, Mr Bharat Jagdeo, the architect of the party’s political campaign, has failed to convince anyone that these repeated instances were not naked fraud and part of a planned strategy to rig the election, the party stated.

Recognising the role of online/social media the party said fortunately, people can see at ‘lightning speed’ the extent of the fraud, where it originates and incubates. “Therefore, it will be of no surprise to any Guyanese where the so-called command centre will be located to unleash and manage this new element of fraud.”

Turning attention to GECOM, the party said it  is distressing the sickening silence of GECOM and that of the diplomatic community, who have inserted themselves in the Guyana election process, that they have not condemned the flawed list of electors.

According to the party now that the fraud has been laid bare, there is no word or whisper from them, and the worry about foreign embassies and governments being complicit does not seem to matter. “Instead, for GECOM itself, it is a sorry and sad shell of an institution that requires a complete overhaul, from inside out and top to bottom, before it can truly say it can and has delivered free, fair and credible elections.”