Elections petition to be filed Monday – Harmon

Aug 28, 2020 News

The A Partnership for National Unity+Alliance For Change (APNU+AFC) coalition will file its elections petition of the March 2nd General and Regional Elections on Monday, August 31, at the Supreme Court.

Presumptive Leader of the Opposition, Joseph Harmon

Joseph Harmon, whom the coalition has named the presumptive Leader of the Opposition, announced this in a Facebook post yesterday. He urged the faithful followers of the party to lend their support.
Following that announcement, an APNU+AFC press statement revealed that Harmon has written to several international and local organisations about what he considers electoral fraud related to the recently concluded elections.
In this letter, Harmon reportedly outlined that “based on the vast amount of evidence”, the APNU+AFC Coalition “believes, and intends to prove, that the elections held on March 2 lacked credibility and legitimacy”.
The coalition stated that Harmon attached to the letter a dossier of all the “thousands of cases of fraud, voter impersonation, irregularities, abnormalities and discrepancies which were uncovered.”
On the basis of these submissions, Harmon contended that the current administration was sworn in on the basis of fraudulent results and that it is, therefore, an illegitimate government.
Kaieteur News, in providing extensive coverage of the protracted and painstaking electoral process, had noted only one instance of proven electoral fraud. This is the fraud produced by Region Four Returning Officer, Clairmont Mingo, during his tabulation of the Region Four votes.
He is in police custody after his arrest earlier this week. International observers and independent small parties have sufficiently also proven the extent of this fraud.
Mingo’s actions had proven that there was sufficient knowledge very early on that the then APNU+AFC government had lost its bid for re-election, as the manipulation included the artificial inflation of the vote count in favour of the Coalition.
During the national recount, it became evident that the APNU+AFC campaign had embarked on a misinformation campaign of smoke and mirrors, in an attempt to convince the public and the international community that the elections it lost were fraudulent.
To this day, the coalition has not sufficiently proven its claims of electoral fraud.
These matters are expected to be ventilated in the possible elections petition.
In addition to his claims of fraud, Harmon is said to have told the international community that the PPP/C is on a campaign of “state terror, intimidation and political persecution” against the coalition and its supporters.
He alleged that pressure or direction is being placed on the Guyana Police Force, the Office of the Director of Public Prosecution and other State agencies to target and persecute members of the opposition.
To add to that, Harmon is reported to have shared with them the fixed date applications and affidavits filed in the Court by former Director of Sport, Christopher Jones and his wife, Christine Jones against certain officers of the police force and the Attorney General, for alleged infringements of their constitutional rights, as steps were taken to retrieve State assets from Jones.
Harmon is said to have written to the Secretaries General of the United Nations, Commonwealth, Amnesty International, the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) and the Organisation of American States (OAS) and the Presidents of the United Nations Human Rights Council, the Inter Parliamentary Union and Parlamericas, the Chair of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association and a number of other international organizations.
He also is said to have written to several foreign countries including the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and to the Prime Ministers and Leaders of the Opposition of all CARICOM countries and the European Union.
It is also said that the correspondences were sent to all of Guyana’s diplomatic missions, Guyana’s country representatives of the United Nations and Inter-American Development Bank and a series of local organisations.