So, while the Chief Justice is one of the defendants in the Bar's lawsuit, he is acting as the presiding judge in an important case leading up to the 2020 General Elections.
As we told you last night, Michael Ashcroft has successfully joined the redistricting lawsuit that the Belize Peace Movement and others have brought against the Elections and Boundaries Commission and the Government. They say that the time has long past since the Commission needed to carry out a redistricting exercise to fix the huge disparity in the sizes of‚ Belize's 31 electoral divisions.
The claimants are seeking declarations against the Elections and Boundaries Commission that it has failed to do its job. They are also trying to get the judge to order the Commission and the Government to carry out a redistricting exercise. They are also seeking an injunction to restrain the Commission and the Government from holding the 2020 General Elections until after the redistricting exercise has been completed.
That's a lot of complaints against the Commission, and so today, we sought comment from its Chairman, Doug Singh. In an extended, 24-minute, sit-down interview, he carefully explained what has caused the urgently needed re-districting exercise to be pushed back for so long. We start tonight with his comments on the fact that the Commission wanted to carry out re-districting several years ago, but that the Commission chose instead to conduct re-registration because of the public outcry to "clean up" the voter's list:
Doug Singh - Chairman, Elections and Boundaries Commission
"If you check your archives, you will see that the commission came up publicly announced that it had voted by the majority which includes both the PUP representatives and United Democratic Party representatives to conduct a re-divisioning exercise. In fact, it would be on that. The process by law requires establishing a working committee in the minutes of the elections and boundaries, which has been submitted as evidence to the court. We named the leader of that team which was not objected by any member of the commission, which would have been Ms. Noreen Fairweather. She was contacted and the other members of that committee was a representative from the Attorney General's office, a representative from natural resources and a representative of, I can't remember if it was Vital Statistics. Because you need to be able, you need technical people, to bring those things together."
"Mrs. Tamai and I then sought to go out and do a bit of sensitization and we met with the National Teachers Union at their headquarters. We met with many different bodies and the feedback that we've got was essentially that these groups were not interested in having a re-divisioning, until a re-registration was done. In fact, if you check your archives, you will see that some of these very people Mr. Bobby Lopez, Mr. Paco Smith, Mr. Kareem Musa - who is not a party to this but represented his political party, or his opinion at that time. But there was quite a kickback to say, that no, don't do re-divisioning, do re-registration. We didn't think it made sense to do the re-registration exercise first because the number of registered voters, at the time we made the recommendation, for re-divisioning was over 200,000. I think it was like 208,000 if I'm not mistaken. And that is coming out of the last elections. We felt strongly that when you start a re-divisioning, the number of people who will re-register will not give you a proper picture of the distribution. For example, if more people registered in Stann Creek West, Orange Walk North and Toledo West, than registered in the City, or registered in Punta Gorda Town and Corozal Bay - In urban areas, people move a bit slower because they think they can get to it. In the rural areas, we saw higher numbers to turn out."
"It would not give you a proper representation of the distribution of voters. Today, there is only about 75 or 76% of the people that were registered at the end of the last election. So, we only have about 75% of people who have numbers on the voter's list. Is that an adequate basis to do a redivisioning at that point in time, when it is highly likely that between now and the next general election there are going to be large amounts of people reregistering to vote for the general election, who did not choose to register before. Those people will not be part of the re-divisioning exercise and once again you could end up with extreme unbalances as a result of those people going out and registering to vote. The reason the commission advocated for the re-divisioning when the base was larger, was because it felt that it had a recent snapshot of how many people came up to vote in what constituencies, and how many people were registered in those constituencies. And mix of that information gave you a good picture of what you can do for re-divisioning exercise or a re-districting as it's commonly called. Of course, the commission then after the outcry of the people, said, you know, why don't we go and do the reregistration exercise? We don't believe that it will assist us in being able to do the re-divisioning in time for the next general election. If this is what the public wants, let's afford it. And so, we conducted that reregistration exercise, which was completed at the end of 2017, I think, around November 2017. Shortly after that, we had our referendum that had to be administered by the elections and boundaries department. We had Village Elections, which is a two-month period. So, the department was quite busy but during that time the commission sought feedback from the representative parties of the commission, which is representative of the UDP and the PUP, to their feedback on the way forward with respect to re-divisioning. I am still waiting for a response from the People's United Party."
"We're are few months away from when legally general election needs to be called. I believe, the constitution provides for five years. Within five years after the previous election, so November, sometime in November this year is the outside date that the elections should be called. What does that mean? Can the elections and boundaries commission undertake a re-divisioning exercise at this point? And to be able to meet the mandate of the Prime Minister, who has the power to call elections at any time. The answer in our position at the commission is no. The last re-divisioning exercise took 14 months for a recommendation to be made by the commission. The subcommittee made its recommendation to the commission, the commission embraced it, made whatever corrections to the recommendation it needed and then, that went to the national assembly. If there's any change in the number of seats, an increase in the number of seats, it will require a constitutional amendment. It then would have to be tabled. It would have to wait the statutory 90 days before it can actually be passed or voted on finally before you can even consider the path to the amendments to the constitution."
Tune in tomorrow, when you'll hear the chairman explain why redistricting is not a realistic expectation at this time. You'll also see his response when we challenged him on the huge disparity in the size of the 31 electoral divisions which still exist today.
Email
Print