Was Published on the May 31, 2020
As matters now stand, ninety days after the March 2020 elections, the wish of the Granger-led APNU+AFC is that Claudette Singh will deliver to it a victory denied by the electorate. That party has reason to be optimistic. Claudette Singh voted against eight and one-half of the ten motions brought by the opposition-appointed GECOM commissioners; was present on both occasions when Mingo made his transparently fraudulent District 4 declaration; compounded that failure by keeping that declaration live; insisted on a recount Order (# 60 of 2020) in violation of the Aide Memoire of the agreement signed by Granger, Jagdeo and CARICOM chair; and allowed herself to be transformed into a figure of national derision by Lowenfield, Roxanne Myers and the COVID Task Force.
There is fear that the allocation of stations in the Recount Order and Addendum of May 29 as they become available seems designed to ensure that the recount will be a replay of Mingo’s District Four fiasco with the difference being that that this time, the main actors will be Lowenfield and Myers. The same Myers who was installed through the instrumentality of Granger’s illegally appointed James Patterson.
Having shared with Singh the date of appointment as Senior Counsel by Granger, Basil Williams is playing to Singh by praising her eminent qualifications and wealth of experience as a judge. He now seeks to encourage Claudette Singh to function as judge and jury, executor and arbitrator, public authority and tribunal. Again, Singh is so predictably unpredictable that she may very well admit that she and her Commissioners have failed in their duty to supervise elections in accordance with their constitutional mandate!
Ignoring the basic principle that he who asserts must prove, Williams is now saying that it is GECOM’s responsibility to investigate APNU’s outlandish claims of discrepancies involving between 90,000 votes according to Aubrey Norton, and as much as 175,000 by Joseph Harmon. The claim being peddled by Harmon and Norton in particular, is simple in its inanity: take any box and raise a single question about one vote, and hey, the entirety of the votes in that box becomes discredited. What Harmon, Norton and Williams lack in intellect, commonsense and consistency, is over-compensated for by bullyism, deceit and force.
With no evidence produced, Norton reduces his argument to absurdity by claiming that there were only 1,261 foreign voters or 65% of the Coalition’s 1,937 claims of irregularities, reminding me of my days doing Economics in school and being taught that spurious accuracy earns credibility. Unfortunately, Norton did not provide particulars of the irregularities involving the other 676 dead voters who arose from eternal sleep in the blissful Le Repentir, found their way to various polling stations, past the police, presiding officer and party agents, voted and then returned to their peaceful abode.
Basil Williams has cited expansively the several recitals in the Recount Order but very conveniently ignores part of the recital that speaks of “statistical anomalies” which Harmon and Norton seem not to acknowledge or to understand. Let us try to help them.
1. Each Polling Station has three GECOM officials – a presiding officer, a poll clerk and a counting agent. GECOM therefore had 7,017 officials in 2,339 polling stations. Add to that the 2,339 APNU+AFC Polling Agents and for the smaller parties 233 agents, being one out of every ten polling stations. That gives a grand total of 9,589 non-PPP persons. What is the statistical probability of not one of these 9,589 persons detecting a single one of the many thousands who according to Harmon, Norton and Williams committed impersonation on March 2, 2020?
2. The indelible ink used to mark a voter’s index finger takes days and weeks to disappear or wash out. What is the statistical probability of even 1% of Norton’s 80,000 cleaning off their ink and finding someone looking like them, with a matching ID card turning up at these polling stations again and getting past 9,589 persons? Not to mention the 2,339 police officers standing at the entrance of the polling stations to deter various forms of voting offences.
3. What is the statistical probability of all these cases of double voting timing their entry to the hundreds of polling stations so as to avoid the visits by the scores of foreign and local observers including those from the pro-Government GPSU?
4. What is the statistical probability of the APNU+AFC dominated GECOM Secretariat led by Lowenfield and Myers employing not one, not one hundred, not one thousand, but 7,017 individuals who could possibly be so inept not to detect a single anomaly on voting day?
5. What is the statistical probability of all 2,339 APNU+AFC polling agents being so collectively incompetent, blind, dumb and asleep unable to detect or report a single case of the type of anomaly of which the APNU+AFC recounting agents are now claiming took place on a scale so massive that the elections are no longer credible?
6. The PPP/C gained 202,000 votes in 2015 and 232,000 votes in 2020. If we take away Harmon’s 86,000 votes from the PPP/C’s 2020 votes, they are left with 146,000 votes. What is the statistical probability of a Party that had thrashed the APNU and the AFC in November 2018 municipal elections by a margin of 1.8:1 losing 37% of its voter support between 2015 and 2020?
7. If Harmon’s 86,000 figure is correct it means that 20% of the votes cast in 2020 are invalid. What is the statistical probability of one out of every five votes cast being unlawful in a thoroughly paper-based elections?
Like Williams, I am relying on the skewed Order 60 that was rigged away from a recount to a farcical audit. The foolishness being peddled by Harmon, Norton and Williams and their Recount agents cannot pass the commonsense test. GECOM ought not to have encouraged and accepted such nonsense in the first place. When all these statistical probabilities are added together, they have moved to the realm of impossibility. Note that I am using a matrix clearly consistent with Order 60.
I will not presume to tell Claudette Singh what she should do with the recurring theme of unsubstantiated anomalies in the Observation Reports. It is clear that they have no merit. But so too was the fraudulent tabulation of Mingo, Volda Lawrence and Lowenfield which Claudette Singh has preserved rather than investigate. Instead, quite outside of her and GECOM’s jurisdiction, she is pursuing baseless allegations in violation of her own principle in the Esther Perreira case that he who asserts must prove.
Finally, I draw attention to the opinion of Chief Justice Roberts of the US Supreme Court in a decision handed two days ago in a COVID-19 related case: improbability and its converse are fundamental to the determination of litigated issues.