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Feb 8, 2008

Third parties receive few votes

Obviously the Peoples’ United Party was the big loser in Thursday’s election but the P.U.P. was not the only casualty. It could be argued that the victim of the most lethal blow was Belize’s fledging third party movement. Not one of the thirty-one non traditional candidates, whether V.I.P., N.R.P., N.B.A. or independent, managed to win more than eight percent of the vote in any single constituency. Some of the numbers were so small as to be almost unbelievable—particularly in light of the boasts made by some of the candidates. Take the example of N.R.P. leader and Cayo North East candidate Cornelius Dueck. On election day he soberly told News Five that he expected his party to win a number of seats in the House of Representatives. In the end Dueck barley topped four percent and no other N.R.P. candidate captured more than four and a half. And the rest fared a little better. The V.I.P., which complained it was not taken seriously enough by this television station, was not a factor in the election with Paul Morgan topping out at a less than expected eight percent of the vote in Belmopan. Wil Maheia, whose P.N.P./N.B.A. alliance was supposed to impact Toledo East, received only two hundred ninety-nine votes out of close to four thousand, five hundred cast … and then there was the case of Jorge Ernesto Babb. The eccentric perennial fringe candidate may go down in Belizean political history as the ultimate spoiler. We’ll never know what could have been but Babb’s paltry nineteen votes in Freetown loom unusually large to losing U.D.P. candidate Michael Peyrefitte … who lost in a squeaker to the P.U.P.’s Francis Fonseca … by a total of sixteen votes.


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