U.D.P. and P.U.P. claim victory in village council elections
On Sunday, residents in forty-seven villages countrywide went to the polls to elect a chairperson and seven councillors. And while the party lines in village elections can sometimes be blurred, in a press release from its secretariat, the United Democratic Party is claiming the lion’s share of the slates, thirty-four in fact, as victories for their party. These include wins in what the opposition refers to as P.U.P. “strongholds” of San Jose Succotz, Valley of Peace, and Buena Vista in the Cayo district. According to the U.D.P., Blackman Eddy was taken by an independent slate. Again those are the U.D.P.’s facts and if you believe their numbers it would mean that the P.U.P. only formed the majority in eleven villages. If you would like to know exactly how many votes a particular candidate received, the results will be published in the local newspapers or you can request the information directly from the Ministry of National Development in Belmopan. On March twenty-fifth, fifty-six more villages will go to the polls. Voting will continue each weekend until all one hundred and eighty-one villages and twelve communities have selected their representatives. Village Council Elections are held every three years. Officially, village council elections are non-partisan, but increasingly candidates are aligning themselves along party lines.
In late word from the People’s United Party, their secretariat has taken strong objection to the claims made by the U.D.P., calling the Opposition “deceptive in its release by misrepresenting the facts” in order to influence the remaining village council elections. As for the numbers, the PUP is saying it won fifteen of the nineteen slates in Corozal and Toledo as well as the Burrell Boom seats. In Cayo, the ruling party claims low voter turnout affected the elections but says they have gained ground in several areas. And while the PUP conceded to a loss in Independence, it says that the Opposition only won by a margin of less than two percent of the total vote count. Overall, the PUP says it believes it has won sixty percent of the village council elections and maintains that another eighteen percent is politically unaffiliated. So in a nutshell, both the P.U.P. and the U.D.P. are claiming victory in an event that officially is supposed to be politically neutral. We await the official results in order to verify the contradictory claims of the two political parties.
