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The Elections and Boundaries  Department and hundreds of public officers are getting ready for Wednesday, May 8th when all systems go live for the ICJ Referendum.  

But getting ready for that date means destroying all the tens of thousands of  ballots that had been printed for the failed April 10th referendum.  So, the Elections and Boundaries office had to set aside today to make an orderly destruction of all these papers - and they invited the media. Here’s what the cameras saw:…

It might have been mistaken for a drug cargo, or some illicit product, seized and then burned here at Pine Lumber, mile 61 on the George Price Highway. But, these are actually voters ballots, numbered, bound, and assigned to constituencies, and then

Condemned to history for a referendum that never happened. Today, the Chief Elections Officer oversaw the destruction along with the Chief Magistrate and a fleet of public officers. As they copiously annotated by series. The dismemberment and destruction of over 150 thousand ballots.

Josephine Tamai - Chief Elections Officer
"We all know that a new referendum date has been set, we know that a new law has been passed and therefore we need to destroy the ballots that were printed before. In order for us to ensure that we have some transparency, we decided to do it publicly so that the public could actually see that the destruction is taking place even before we go into referendum day."

Reporter
"Now how many ballots are actually being destroyed? What actual investment was put into these ballots, what's the cost?"

Josephine Tamai
"Well actually that was a lot of investment because we did sample ballots; we also did the real ballots. We have approximately 173 thousand ballots that we are actually destroying because they were for altered electoral divisions and when it comes to the cost, it's difficult to say a real cost at this time because we have to also look at the man power that went into it because when ballots are being printed, those are always done under supervision with security at all times."

Reporter
"So we're talking about over 100 thousand dollars?"

Josephine Tamai
"No, a rough estimate would be under 50 thousand dollars."

All now gone up in smoke, relegated to the ashbin of history - whether it was all for a political lark, or whether some greater purpose of transparency was served will only be told in time.

It was a tedious process because each serial number of the destroyed ballots had to be crossed out. It went on well into the evening.