Turning back now to our press encounter with Public Service Minister Henry Charles Usher, we asked for an update on the referendum petition submitted by the coalition of Belizean churches and their allies.
On May 3rd, the churches went to the Belize House in Belmopan to submit several boxes of petitions from Belizeans who want a referendum on legalizing marijuana.
The churches strongly insisted that they have done an in-depth reconciliation process to ensure that the 10% threshold, or a little over 18,000 registered voters, has been met to successfully trigger the referendum. The Elections and Boundaries Department will determine whether or not their list meets the requirements for validating those voters. For a little over a month now, they have been doing their count of the signatures submitted, and according to the Minister whose responsible for that department, they requested additional personnel to help with that reconciliation process:
Henry Charles Usher - Minister of Public Service
"As to your second question, the 60 days -two months - have not expired as yet, in terms of the vetting of the signatures. The Chief Elections officer did request from the Ministry of Public Service some additional help to vet the signatures, and we provided those with some public officers going over there and assisting her because, well, they were conducting village council elections at the same time, so they needed to be extra hands. So that has been done. I'm not sure where they are with it, but I do know that the two months have not yet expired. When they do complete their exercise, they will then inform the governor-general and if the threshold was met, which means it's 10% of the total voting population, so our own 18,600 or so, if the threshold was met, then the Governor-General by law would need to issue a Writ of Referendum."
