When the ruling PUP decided in February of 1970 to arrest Ismail Shabazz and me and charge us with seditious conspiracy, I absolutely couldn’t figure out why.

The PUP had demolished an NIPDM Opposition coalition by a count of 17 seats to one in the December 1969 general election just about ten weeks earlier.

And, in mid-January of 1970, the coalition between UBAD and the Shoman/Musa PAC had fallen apart. UBAD was basically now a memory from the summer of 1969, with just five officers remaining — myself, Shabazz, Charles X Eagan, Galento X Neal, and Alfred X Faber. UBAD had no financial backers whatsoever.  

The most I can figure after all these decades is that I must have angered someone personally in the new Cabinet. I can remember being somewhat rude to a PUP candidate, who became Attorney General, in the voters’ line at the Salvation Army polling station in the 1969 general election.

Remember now, in 1970 the legal voting age was 21, so many UBAD supporters were not eligible to vote, and UBAD had declared itself a cultural group. 

But, after a jury acquitted Shabazz and me on the sedition charge in July of 1970, I decided to seek to convince the UBAD membership to become a political party. My reasoning was that the PUP would come at us again, and we could better defend ourselves by becoming a political party. My reasoning, in retrospect, was quite faulty, and the decision to go political was a mistake. But, as Steve McQueen said in The Magnificent Seven, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

At some point in 1971, someone in the UBAD leadership discovered how to register names of voters (with their addresses) at the Magistrate’s Court without such individual having to actually be present. All you had to do, then, if you were an organized party, was present someone who claimed such a name when an election was held. There was no photographic process, and it was essentially a way to steal votes. You would have to bring in voters from outside the city, or figure out a way for voters to remove the ink from their fingers so they could then vote more than one time.  

UBAD registered a number of fictitious persons. I have an idea who came up with the scheme and operated it, but I can’t finger someone without proof. I don’t know for sure. I was not on top of the scheme, which is probably an indication of how non-political I may be.

In any case, such a scheme was in effect in December of 1977 when the UDP blew out the PUP’s Dynamic Nine in the Belize City Council election. At that time, the 21-year-old vote was still the law.

Between December 1977 and the critical general election of late 1979, however, the ruling PUP changed the electoral system. 18-year-olds were allowed to vote, and more important, voters had to produce photographic identification of themselves. The old scam/scheme was thus thrown out the window, and when the UDP lost the 1979 generals, which was a great surprise to many, they made many different claims of PUP fraud, such as a special chemical ink or something like that.

For all these decades, I have never seen or heard anyone discuss this “registration-without-photograph” process from the years before 1978, and there must be only a few people still alive who know about it. It is so amazing that the voter registration process before 1978 was so porous and vulnerable to fraud.

When Republican Donald Trump claimed in 2020 that the Democratic Party had stolen the presidential election from him, it didn’t make any sense to me. The United States is the most powerful and sophisticated nation on earth, so how could their election process offer such opportunity for fraud? Still, the U.S. does have an absentee voting arrangement, so perhaps this is what Trump is blaming.

In Belize, before 1978 the electoral system was flawed. The eminent Belizean intellectual, Sandra Coye, has been saying for years that our Belizean system today is open to investigation and victimization because the ballots are numbered. She has not been paid much attention, but Sandra, of course, is someone who demands respect.

All I’m saying in this column is that something was seriously wrong in the registration/voting system here in British Honduras/Belize before 1978. Someone in UBAD who was friendly or linked to the UDP in some way, probably discovered the flaw, and the UDP used it to blow out the Dynamic Nine in 1977.