Election Petition case management set for Oct 22 – Harmon

Amid sustained insistence for a quick hearing to two elections petition it has filed, the APNU+AFC coalition announced on Tuesday that the matter will come up for case management next week.

Opposition Leader Joseph Harmon in a Facebook live Tuesday afternoon said Chief Justice Roxanne George has responded to the Coalition’s lawyers, indicating that the case management will be done on October 22, 2020.

At the case management hearing, the date for the hearing of the petitions is expected to be set.

Other timelines and deadlines related to the petitions before the Court will also be set.

Harmon anticipates that this is the beginning to a speedy determination of the matter.

“The ball is rolling,” he said.

The APNU+AFC filed its first elections petition on August 31^st, 2020, officially challenging the outcome of the March 02, 2020 elections from which the People’s Progressive Party emerged victorious.

Ultimately, the Coalition wants the Supreme Court, after hearing its petition, to cancel those polls, which saw it losing the seat of Government, and order fresh polls within 90 days.

If they succeed in their case, the petitioners are seeking orders from the court to declare that elections were so badly held that the results from it cannot be deemed to be the will of the people. At the same time, they want the Court to throw out the elections and have David Granger declared as President under those very elections they claim were conducted against the electoral laws and constitution of the country.

The petitioners want the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) to use the vote count from the Ten Returning Officers to declare the results of the elections. That would include the District Four vote Count which has been condemned as fraudulent.

The petitioners contend that the Chief Elections Officer was not required to use the data from the national vote recount to produce his elections report from which the results were declared.