Defence counsel Nigel Hughes on Monday pressed forensic auditor Terrence Jaskaran over several Statements of Poll (SOPs) that were recorded as blank or were missing from the bundle of election documents examined during his analysis of the 2020 elections.
During cross-examination before Principal Magistrate Faith McGusty, Hughes focused on Region Four SOPs, including numbers 4519, 4554 and 4555, which were absent from the chronological bundle presented in court. For region Six, SOPs 6038, 6308 and 6309 are missing.
Jaskaran acknowledged that the SOP numbers had been recorded as blank in his report, although he maintained that he had seen physical SOPs bearing those numbers during his analysis. He said Police Officer Nigel Stephens told him that the missing documents were “unavailable.”
Jaskaran further told the court that, after highlighting the missing SOPs in his report, he made no further inquiries into why they were unavailable.
The questioning also established that Jaskaran’s assignment did not include independently authenticating the documents against records held by the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM).
Jaskaran agreed that he was not commissioned by GECOM to audit the 2020 elections, did not consult anyone from GECOM and did not receive GECOM reports concerning election staff, polling officials or party agents. He said the information used for his analysis came from the Guyana Police Force.
Hughes also questioned Jaskaran about a Form 23A shown in court. The witness said he could not identify a GECOM stamp, watermark or special security marking on the document and had not cross-referenced the information on it against GECOM records.
Jaskaran repeatedly maintained that authentication was outside the scope of his assignment. He said his instruction from Stephens was to provide an analysis and tabulation of the certified copies presented and report variances by region against the Form 24 declarations.
He also confirmed that he did not examine Mingo’s spreadsheet, any political party spreadsheet, the election server or flash drive, court orders concerning the tabulation process, or the chain of custody of the documents before they were copied.
The cross-examination comes as Jaskaran faces questions about an analysis that found substantial numerical differences between certified SOP totals and Form 24 declarations, including a 19,842-vote difference for APNU+AFC in Region Four between his SOP tabulation and the March 13 declaration.
Jaskaran has maintained that his work was a numerical and tabulation exercise involving the extraction of figures from certified SOPs, their entry into Excel spreadsheets and comparison with the declarations.
