Frankly Speaking Just how can elections rigging take place?

Never Trump! Why Carter?

As both a “then–PNC man” and professional public servant who doubled as General Elections PR/Publicity head for three elections, I attracted the ire of the PPPplus opponents and other independent or “civic-society” types. They tended to classify me as some electoral engineer/a rigger. Especially during the 1980 and 1985 polls which the PNC won.

Beginning in 1968 that party was tainted with the real or perceived characteristic of “rigging” elections, stealing the electoral will of the people. Especially the thousands of voters who favoured Cheddi Jagan’s People’s Progressive Party (PPP).

Frankly Speaking, no matter how consistently the existing PNC die-hards would essay to deny known facts, significant, even “massive” elections fraud was perpetrated. I’m talking about ’68 to ’85 – including a referendum. But I Allan Fenty was never included in the art and science of PNC (alleged) electoral control and manipulation.

For three elections – ’80 to ’92 – I supervised the PR/propaganda/public education elections Unit to getout-the–vote for the ruling PNC. Why? I believed strongly then the PNC would do more for all the people of this country than a victorious PPP would do (for all of us). I never saw Burnham or Hoyte as active racists! Like Cheddi, these two PNC leaders truly felt that they had the ideological underpinning, the political accommodation and economic policies and programmes for the development then prosperity of our nation.

Alas! Burnham’s visionary – sometimes revolutionary and transformational – programmes became undermined by a combination of absolute power and its abuse, betrayal by “loyalists,” external factors, opposition sabotage and plain mis-management. Add the persecution, fear and uncertainty of rivals and despair by opponents at elections time and the results was mass migration and “stagnant development” which even Desmond Hoyte and his ERP could not turn around before President Carter persuaded him to oversee free and fair elections in 1992. Which brings me to the phenomenon of rigging.

Rigging then – and now?

As a member of the PNC in the seventies – then longtime supporter, I always wondered – like the late journalist Cecil Griffith – just why CARICOM’s leaders never actively repudiated Burnham – or Hoyte in ’85 – for the strident claims, with even British evidence, of rigging the polls and their results. One guess as to that answer.

But what were the (alleged) elements of control, manipulation, “rigging” of the people’s votes in those days? 1968 to 1985? Let’s begin with (1) The Elections Commission, its Chairperson and the electoral machinery.