Election officials, police, say they’re ready
Today political parties and the media sat in separate sessions with officials of the Elections and Boundaries Department and Police to review the do’s and don’ts of election day. The issues dealt with included nomination day, timelines of the department’s internet updates, the voting process itself, the electoral list, the counting, and details of the Commonwealth Observer Mission coming to scrutinize the process. The top brass at both the Elections and Boundaries and the Police Departments say they have things in place for a smooth day at the polls.
Ruth Meighan, Acting Chief Elections Officer
“Who actually runs the election is the returning officer. So the police and the political party had the agreement and I guess it’s a gentleman’s agreement so we do expect that they live up to their agreement.”
“We’ll have one election, two ballots. One presiding officer will be sitting there. The voter will come in and cast his ballot for the General Elections and then come back and cast his ballot for the referendum, so it is basically just almost similar to the two elections that we had in 2003, except that we will only have one presiding officer in the polling station.”
Marion Ali
“And a voter can opt to not vote for the senate?”
Ruth Meighan
“Like any other elections, that’s your choice. You could choose to partake in an election and you could choose not to.”
Marion Ali
“How can you assure Belizeans that this will be a transparent process?”
Ruth Meighan
“Well, we have our public officers working the elections and speaking from a public officer’s point of view, what we do is we go out there and run an election. And so you come in, you vote. At the end of the day we close the ballot box and we take it to the returning officer with the police escort and of course the scrutineers accompany and we take it into the counting station and that is where the counting take place.”
Myrtle Palacio, Director, Office of Governance
“The Commonwealth Secretariat will send a team to Belize. I have worked with several of these teams, including CARICOM, COMSEC … all over the Caribbean and Commonwealth countries and so on. They are very much independent. They will come, they will make their announcement, they will find you. They know how to reach out in a country and they will of course report to the government and to the Department and the Commission and they will have their own conferences with you and one on one. They haven’t said what date they’re going to be here but usually for a country this size they would send a small advance team then the major team that will do the observation. But it is the whole idea of having another audit of transparency and so on. It’s not necessarily because you have a problem.”
Gerald Westby, Commissioner of Police
“We have the B.D.F support, we have Coast Guard support and we will be ready for that day come election but we will be acting in support of the elections machinery. Of course if we need to maintain and there’s a open breach or criminal act then we’ll deal with that as police.”
“We’ll be having senior officers at the counting stations the night so that we exercise proper command and control. We will enforcing the “no sale of liquor” during polling and we have also made recommendations to prohibit license holders – firearm license holders not to take their firearms to the counting and polling stations, so these are some of the things we will be very rigid with.”
People who need to check where exactly they will vote can call the Elections and Boundaries Department. This week’s newspapers also contain the relevant information to clarify whatever uncertainty the redistricting exercise might have created. Meanwhile, the parties have agreed that the “Third Parties” will go first on Nomination Day, while the P.U.P. will go later in the morning and the U.D.P. will do their thing in the afternoon.
