BELIZE CITY, Wed. Feb. 20, 2019– On April 10, Belizeans are expected to vote in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) referendum on whether or not Belize should submit Guatemala’s claim to the ICJ for a final and binding resolution.
The ICJ referendum will be the first national balloting exercise since the re-registration of voters took place to clean up the voters’ list last July.
On Wednesday, February 20, Belize’s Chief Elections Officer, Josephine Tamai, confirmed that at the end of January there were 134,349 registered voters whose names had made it onto the official voting list.
Before the re-registration exercise, there were 205,065 registered voters, which means that the new voters’ list is short of almost 71,000 persons who were on the previous list.
Under the new voter re-registration regime, identification cards have still not yet been issued.
We asked Tamai if voters will be affected come referendum day if they don’t have their ID card.
Tamai explained that the Elections and Boundaries Department will begin to issue voter identification cards on March 1.
“We have not started to issue ID cards as yet. We plan to do a phase-in of ID cards beginning on March 1, even though the law states that you don’t have to have your voter ID card to vote,” Tamai said.
Tamai added, “What we can assure the public is that definitely the ID cards will be ready.”
Tamai explained, “We will be going into the villages where we went for the re-registration to issue voter ID cards.”
We asked the Chief Elections Officer how the referendum votes will be handled when the time comes for the counting, since it is not an election where there are representatives of political parties operating as counting agents in the counting areas.
“In terms of that we know, the Referendum Act says that the referendum should take place similar to that of a general election under the Representation of the People’s Act. We know that the Representation of the People’s Act speaks to candidates, so we are going to invite community organizations for them to apply and express their interest as referendum monitors. They will have similar responsibilities as agents,” Tamai explained.
Tamai said they are planning to have information booths on the actual day of the referendum, where people can pick up their ID cards.
Tamai said that the new ID cards are not the laminated types and will be different in appearance. She said even the logo will be changed. According to Tamai, the cards will be similar to the driver’s license and social security cards. She also said that the Elections and Boundaries Department still has thousands of the old ID cards that voters have not picked up from them.