BELIZE CITY, Wed. Oct. 5, 2022

On Monday, the most recent session of the Redistricting case brought by the Belize Peace Movement (BPM) against the government of Belize was held in the courtroom of Supreme Court judge Genevieve Chabot, who is now presiding over the case following the ascension of Justice Michelle Arana to the Court of Appeal. The purpose of Monday’s session was to fully update the new sitting judge on the case. In two weeks, on October 18, the parties will be in court once again, and questions will be posed at that time to the expert witness in this case. (As mentioned in earlier reports, Lord Michael Ashcroft joined the proceedings as an interested party and financed the hiring of an expert witness to map suggested layouts for the redistricting process in Belize.)

At the end of the process, there should be a roughly equal number of voters in each of the country’s 31 constituencies — ensuring equal representation for all residents of Belize, and, despite a purported effort by an appointed Redistricting Task Force to accomplish such a goal, the claimants are seeking, by means of the case, to have the Elections and Boundaries Commission make a proposal to Parliament to carry out the redistricting process..

“This case is asking for one simple question: for section 90 of the Constitution to be adhered to, for the Elections and Boundaries Commission to make a proposal to Parliament to allow for the distribution of voters to make constituencies as equal as possible. Once that is done, then it goes back to the Elections and Boundaries Department to draw those lines. Those lines, as the expert has stated, could be done within a matter of days,” the attorney for the claimants, Arthur Saldivar, explained.

He said clearly that the Re-districting Task Force established by the government has no legal authority under the Constitution and is in his view merely an attempt at gerrymandering.

“The task force is set up with an agenda of bias, because it is geared toward moving voters from areas where they predominantly vote for a particular party, into another area where they continue to vote for that party and its preferred candidate,” Saldivar commented.

He noted that the matter of the task force had been brought forward by the defendants in their strike-out application (in an attempt to suggest that a litigative effort to initiate a redistricting process was no longer necessary) and was roundly put down by the courts.

“It cannot be used as a basis to say that they are complying with the Constitution. What it is really, it’s a wasteful exercise, because it’s taking taxpayers’ money to pay for something that public servants have been doing from time immemorial,” Saldivar said.

Saldivar further made reference to Minister Henry Charles Usher’s suggestion of a merger of the Caye Caulker and St. George’s Caye voters with those in Fort George, in which there are a below-average number of voters, and noted that such a decision would go against section 90(2) of the Constitution.

“The geographical features and transportation concerns would have to be taken into consideration when looking at the boundaries and setting up the boundaries of a constituency in a redistricting process. So, you would not go so far, to find additional votes to make up the numbers. You’d have to first look closer,” Saldivar said.

Saldivar went on to point out that voters in divisions that are in closer geographical proximity to the Fort George Division — such as Pickstock, Albert and Caribbean Shores, all of which are constituencies where the number of voters is below-average — would be looked at first for possible mergers that could bolster the number of voters in the Fort George Division, rather than a division as far from that constituency as Caye Caulker.

“We could actually amalgamate Fort George and Caribbean Shores. It would be a very interesting amalgamation, I think,” he said. “In that regard, what would we do, then, with Mesopotamia? Mesopotamia is a small constituency as Queen’s Square, as is Albert, so we could see a situation where Mesopotamia and Queen’s Square become 1, or Mesopotamia and Albert become one. It’s just a question of which representative go home,” Saldivar went on to remark.

The Re-districting Task Force has already been ruled to be outside the Constitution, according to Saldivar, but will likely be used to generate a proposed redistribution layout to Parliament that would be favorable to the current members of government.

“Whether it is constitutional or not, our leaders don’t really care. They are hellbent on spending that money and on doing this exercise, and I believe thereafter they will want to float a proposal to Parliament which will then show boundaries drawn with their particular leanings in mind,” Saldivar said, adding that these decisions, which would be unconstitutional, may be challenged if that course of action is taken by the government.

Saldivar further noted that it would take a matter of days for the drawing of the new constituency boundaries to take place, since all the data is readily available, making the work of the Re-districting Task Force redundant.

“They have elected to do a task force, but what I’m saying is that by virtue of the day-to-day function of the Elections and Boundaries Department, the number is known, so if the numbers are known and the geographic composition of the constituencies are known, why would you need to create a new entity to do something that is already done. It’s unnecessary, it’s a waste, it’s a waste of time and a waste of money,” Saldivar said.

“The only reason it would take as long as these people want it to take is that they are trying to create an unfair advantage for themselves politically. They are not doing what is necessary under the Constitution; they are doing what they want to do for their political expedience and advantage,” Saldivar went on to say, and he subsequently noted, “The groundwork that they are doing is to find out who votes for who.”

He said that the expert witness was brought into the case to determine how the disparity across the electoral divisions in Belize can be remedied and to suggest a number of possible realignment scenarios.

“He gave three or four possible solutions where he basically was talking about, you could increase the number of constituencies or you could amalgamate some of the constituencies, or you could increase the numbers, the threshold in terms of the number of constituents within constituencies. Now, I don’t see us going over 31 seats, so he also gave us a variation that allows for 31 seats to be maintained,” Saldivar explained, adding that a number of constituencies in Belize City would be brought together, and other out-district constituencies would be divided to create new divisions.

“For example, Stann Creek West would be split, Belmopan would be split, Cayo South would be split, so they were like the creation of 6 in the districts and in the city a number of them would be made one,” he said.

Saldivar explained, “These constituencies’ boundaries are known; they are well established for quite some time. We have polling areas, we know where all the polling areas are. So, for argument’s sake, let’s say you have 16 polling areas, 1 to 16, and you have four constituencies. So, you have four of these polling areas in these four constituencies, right, but now you are going to create 6 constituencies out of the four, so two of those consistencies out of the four are going to slip in two, and the polling areas won’t change. It would just mean that polling areas 12 and 13 that were once in this particular constituency will not go into another one,” he explained.

In reference to the resignation of Martin Aldana from the Re-districting Task Force, Saldivar said, “I expect more resignations from the Task Force, because what you have there is a political process, and you will rarely find politicians agreeing on anything when they are from different parties.”

Notably, the Elections and Boundaries Department compiles a supplementary list of voters each month and presents that data to the Elections and Boundaries Commission. The EBC has the responsibility to review those reports and determine if the distribution of voters is suitable so that each constituent is represented equally.

“They the commissioners [inaudible] should be able to see, because I think they put qualified educated people on that commission, not a bunch of dunces, who can’t read and competency and read numbers and read figures and see when something is out of whack or not. If these are the intelligent people that we are putting on the Elections and Boundaries Commission, they should then know that their responsibility under the Constitution, once they see this disparity as wide as it is where one constituency is 10 times bigger than another constituency, that they would make that proposal. Manuel Esquivel in 1988 took it to Parliament and said that this should never happen again, that we should never have a situation where we have such a disparity in numbers between one constituency and the next,” Saldivar said.