And while Mayor Moya and her team took over City Hall today, that's what will be or has been happening in municipalities across the country. It's the result of a voting process that, all seem to agree, was free and fair. That's the ideal, but ensuring that everything worked smoothly was quite another matter. For the process to work correctly, the Elections and Boundaries office has to mass-mobilize personnel, equipment and data in a way that is both transparent and secure, efficient and reliable.
It's a tough task and the man in charge of it for the first time was Chief Elections Officer Stuart Leslie. Today, he gave us an overview of how things went and offered an explanation for the late results on the Belize City counting.
Stuart Leslie, Chief Elections Officer
"The administration of this election was well done, I felt that wherever they were little problems, there were problems that we have to use to learn from to improve next time."
Alfonso Noble,
In Belize City the counting went into the wee hours of the morning, these are the things you live with but what can be attributed to the slowness of the process?
Stuart Leslie,
"I had hoped, we had some run some tests and so on, and we talked with some of the experienced people and we thought that we would have gotten results sometime between one and two o'clock in the morning and I still believe that is achievable. However there are those factors that experience teaches you. Our returning officer Mr. Gareth Murillo, and he did the right thing, at 8 o'clock felt that he did not have sufficient control of the City Center, that there were too many people that somehow got inside of the Center, including members of the media with cameras and so on, and he did not want to open those ballot boxes until he felt that he had control of the room and with so many people in there and with the energy and tensions very high, he did I believe the right thing. Mr. Murillo cleared the room and he did it in a way that nobody got arrested, there were no fights and so, and together with Assistant Commissioner Jeffries, they took control of the situation. So we started the count two hours behind schedule which was 10 o'clock. In two hours we could have counted 15 boxes."
Alfonso Noble,
We are looking at a complete sweep for the UDP. How unprecedented or how rare has this happened, how often has this happened in Belize's electoral history?
Stuart Leslie,
"I am not sure how far back our records go, I'd have to look at that to see. Certainly from my own memory, having been involved in politics in Belize on a political level, I can't recall in modern times where any party has lost every municipality but we haven't looked at the records as yet. If I could take off my hat as Chief Elections Officer and put on the one as somebody who used to teach political science, this is something that is always said, even in the big countries like the United States, that the system can't afford other alternatives other than the two. I think the Vision Inspired by the People, in this election, made a case that that is not entirely true, that small parties now can begin to build momentum, can find a way to get into the system and not lose their deposit even."
Alfonso Noble,
How long will it be before your office is ready to say people here is the information, do whatever you want with it?
Stuart Leslie,
"The Elections and Boundaries Commission, and the Chairman of the Commission Karl Menzies, expects a full report within the month. I have to go before the Commission within the month. So I have one month to get all the statistics put together and analyzed for him. We're going to have those statistics, we should be able to get them before we go into the weekend in fact, we are waiting for two more divisions to come in."
We'll have much more analysis of the election results later on in the newscast including a statistical breakdown.
