Elections and Boundaries Updates on Registered Voters

In an interview with the press today, Chief Elections Officer Josephine Tamai gave an update on the status of the re-registration. Last year, a three-month mass re-registration exercise ran through the summer and concluded in September. The Elections and Boundaries Department started the continuous registration process in December for which applications are still being accepted. Earlier in the newscast, you heard that persons who wish to vote in the I.C.J. Referendum have until March tenth to register. According to the department, up to December, one hundred and thirty-three thousand and forty-three persons registered across thirty-one divisions.

Josephine Tamai

Josephine Tamai, Chief Elections Officer

“We had the sixty three percent from those figures we gave some time ago. Now, we are basically at approximately sixty-five percent. This sixty-five percent that we are talking about are persons who are eligible to get on the register. Even though we had those numbers of persons coming in to get registered, like we had mentioned, not only because you come in to get registered that your name appears on the voters list. We have to go through the process of doing verifications. We had some persons who registered in more than one division, and they were disallowed because you can only register in one. We had persons who we could not verify that they were Belizean nationals and we need to verify with either the vital statistics or immigration department. So, again for those who we could not verify, those persons were disallowed and those persons were not on the list.”