The Belize Tourism Industry Association is hoping to rock the vote at the next election with an industry-wide voter registration campaign. BTIA launched a 'Voters' Pride Tourism Sweepstakes' in June asking all workers in the industry to register to vote. That voter ID card got tourism workers a free ticket in the sweepstakes to win one of 21 prizes valued at over $17,000. Those prizes were drawn this afternoon at the Marine Terminal and BTIA's Executive Director Andrew Godoy says it is not about the value of the prizes, it is about the power of the vote.
Andrew Godoy, Executive Director - BTIA
"The month of June we had declared as voter pride campaign for the tourism industry and today we're actually doing the drawings.
The way the campaign works is that its open to anyone that works in the tourism industry, whether directly or indirectly. We had located spots throughout the country where we had forms placed. Some forms were faxed directly to companies who requested these forms. All the employees and employers needed to do was fill out the application form with their voter registration number and submit it back to BTIA's National Office."
Keith Swift,
What was the response like?
Andrew Godoy,
"The response was very good for the one month that we had it. In fact we had over 150 companies that sent in forms from their employees with their voter registration numbers to enter the campaign.
We're actually doing this because as you may know the industry, we often hear, accounts for 1 out of 4 persons in the workforce and we felt that its important that we realize or we know the voting bloc that we have, the power that we have in terms of voting.
Certainly you can say that this is political because we are encouraging people to go out there and register. But like I had mentioned before - it's not a partisan one. Which party they vote for is their choice but we felt that our thing was basically to encourage our industry to register.
We know that tourism is growing and as tourism grows, more and more people are being involved in the industry. We believed that when decisions are made, having a large voting population will at the end of the day -whichever party is in power will have to recognize the power that we hold as an industry and will be ready to work with us."
The top winner was Virginia Paulino who won a 2 nights stay for 6 persons at El Pescador Resort in San Pedro. That prize is valued at $2,600. Future voter pride draws will be held monthly and anyone can call or email the BTIA to submit their names. The only requirement is that you be a registered voter. You can find the full list of today's winners at http://www.btia.org
7NEWS produced for broadcast by News Director Jules Vasquez
Edited and Prepared for the internet by Keith Swift