There are strong rumors that the general elections will be held in mid-March - though the PM has only confirmed that it was definitely be within the first six months of 2025.
And it is a virtual certainty that the election will go through without a redistricting exercise. The PUP, of course, blame the UDP's decades of inaction for it not being done sooner, but with halting progress over the last term, they now say the fault is in the lack of accurate information - such as the actual size of the population.
Minister of Public Service Henry Usher gave a timeline and rundown of how the process was going and when exactly it got derailed.
Henry Charles Usher, Chairman, PUP
"You have to remember that, number one, redistricting is done by the Elections and Boundaries Commission, they are authorized by the constitution to carry out this redistricting exercise. They did start a redistricting exercise and they completed that redistricting exercise in terms of providing and preparing a report. Now, if you recall, there was already a case, I think it was claim 55 of 2019 and there was a consent order in that case meaning there was an agreement between the parties that there were certain conditions that had to be met. Number one was preparing the report by a certain date. We had requested that we hold off on preparing that report because the information was not complete and I explained why just now. But the court decided to arbitrarily set a date of July of 2023 to complete the report, that report was supposed to be prepared by the claimants, the Belize Peace Movement, there was supposed to be reference to the Sean Trende report, I don't know if you remember the Sean Trende report, and there was supposed to be a corresponding legislation tabled in the House. All four conditions were met as to this consent order, the date was adhered to, it was shared with the claimant, the Sean Trende report was consulted and then the corresponding legislation was introduced in the House. Unfortunately both sides of the isle, the Government and the Opposition are saying that they have problems with the report but the reason I say they needed more information or that the information was incomplete at the time of the report is because two things were missing. One in the census. The census was completed 2024. In July of 2023 we had not completed the census as yet. The constitution says very clearly that the Elections and Boundaries Commission is supposed to look at the population of the country, not the voting population, the population, and the only way to know the population is through a census. The last census that was done was in 2010. They were using a growth rate prior to 2010 and projecting what the population would have been. They found out after doing the actual census that the growth rate had reduced so whereas their projection from 2010 to 2022 was a population of around 450,000+, it turned out that the population was less than 400,000 after doing the actual census. So it just shows you that you have to wait for all the information. Also the census shows the trends, the movements of persons. Where are they going, are they moving to urban areas, to rural areas? What type of structures are they building, single family homes, apartment buildings, etc. All of this is found in this very comprehensive document which we asked, let them complete the census before the redistricting is done."
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