| Cayo North Standard Bearer Successfully Gets 24 Disqualified From Voter's List |
| Tue, November 26, 2024 |
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| Back in September, we told you that Dr Omar Figueroa was in court fighting to get what he says were phantom voters off the list in Cayo North. That first case ended in a partial victory - since the other side asked for what called a "case stated" - and until that is heard in the high court - about 100 of those voters remain off the list in Cayo North.
But, in November, he and his attorney Jackie Willoughby opened an attack on another front - and one that - to our knowledge has never been used to challenge the validity of voters.
It's called the annual review - and Figueroa was challenging about 100 voters that had been recently transferred - mostly from Belize Rural Central - to Cayo North. Dozens of them would be registered to a single house. It's the oldest game in the PUDP playbook, but Figueroa says in this case, it was impossible to ignore.
And after 8 days in court, in a drawn out and highly technical case before magistrate Kara Walters, they managed to get more than 20 of that 100 persons removed from the list. He told us more today in Cayo.
Dr Omar Figueroa, Standard Bearer, Cayo North
"We have been consistent in our claims that we believe there is a well organized system of electoral fraud happening in Cayo North. Earlier this year for the municipal elections, the mayor and I were seriously concerned when we saw several bus loads brought into the polling area 73 with people we had never seen in our lives. At that point we knew that something serious was happening and that we needed to pay particular attention to the voter's list. During the transfer period this year in July and August, we actually launched two objections, we were successful in the second one, holding off over 100 names on the list. Yesterday, we finished the third objection that we launched this year. The third one was different from the first two because this time it was the annual revision that was at stake so we were objecting to people that were brought onto the list over the last 12 months. We were successful in that we managed to remove 24 persons from the list out of about 100 that we were objecting to. The ones that we lost were basically lost because of technicalities in the process. This is a learning process for us, our attorney played a pivotal role in guiding us. We believe that going forward we will be much better prepared in future objections and we can actually pay closer look at the list now and we are convinced that we will be able to mount a more serious and more effective challenge going forward. It is very concerning to us because we see the abuse of the electoral process. Some houses have I think as many as 100 fraudulent registrations being placed there and elections and boundaries department has really refused to cooperate and conduct a comprehensive investigation into these fraudulent registrations."
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