By Dr. Philip Castillo
International observers perennially certify Belize’s national elections as free and fair – and indeed they mostly are. But as the ongoing court saga in Cayo North demonstrates, the chicanery that does occur in Belize takes place long before actual voting day.
What is playing out in Cayo North is that the transfer of voters from one constituency to another is being legally challenged. A pox on both their houses since both parties are guilty of this malpractice, which persists because of Belize first past the post electoral system coupled with the existence of severely malapportioned constituency counts.
Game theorists rightly regard Belize’s first past the post system as a zero sum game. This means that on election day, there is a winner and a loser. And in our Westminster parliamentary system, the winner has near limitless powers.
With thirty one electoral constituencies, the largest of which has over 10,000 voters and the smallest has less than 2000 voters, the first past the post system means that a win with one vote is as valid as a win with over one thousand votes. This creates a perverse incentive for parties to shift voters from safe constituencies to other constituencies deemed not as safe.
There is in some law, a stipulation that voters must live in the constituency where they vote. Am told there is another law which also stipulates that the candidates for elections are also to live in their respective constituencies. Both laws are widely flaunted. The legal issue, I am told, becomes providing a definition of the word “live.” On the news we are regaled with examples of decrepit houses where countless numbers of voters supposedly live. Proving where a person lives is also a challenge in urban areas where many streets do not have names and more so in villages and rural communities where there are no named streets. The official voter transfer period is in July and August and it is those months that parties assess how many voters to transfer and where to transfer them. With General Elections due next year 2025, this year (2024) may be the last for the bulk transfer of voters from safe constituencies to other constituencies deemed not as safe.
An obvious way of reducing the incentive to transfer voters is to numerically align the 31 constituencies. This very issue is also before the court and it is one area where both parties – despite their differences seem to agree ought not to happen since they both benefit from the status quo. For the PUP, the Party Chairman represents the smallest constituency. 1876 voters were registered in Fort George for the last General Elections. For the UDP, the Party Leader presides over the next smallest constituency with 2277 voters registered in Mesopotamia.
From a polling perspective, there are challenges that arise when there is a deliberate and mass transfer of voters from one constituency to another. It can be assumed that if a voter consents to shift from one constituency to another at the behest of a political party, s/he is most likely a very reliable voter.
Pollsters are challenged to cope with technological shifts in how to reach respondents. Current means of communication include telephone- whether landline or cellular, email, WhatsApp or face to face. I’ve found that face to face interviewing yields the most accurate polling results. But with this method, these newly transferred voters can’t ever –perhaps more accurately – won’t ever be found by a face to face pollster. After all, s/he does not really live at the said address. In fact, if the court litigants are to be believed, s/he may even live abroad.
How will pollsters account for these new voters? Am thinking that expanding the sample size may not help. This is because a sample that ought to be randomly selected will include voters who will vote for different candidates. But not these newly transplanted voters. Since they can’t be located to be included in any face to face interviewing, expanding the sample will merely continue to exclude what could be a voting bloc of unknown size.
Here is my current thought process. Since the voters list does provide addresses, perhaps an actual raw count of the numbers of these newly transplanted voters can be guestimated. These raw counts can be summed and then accounted for in the sample and thereafter in the actual analysis. So then, if in a constituency population of 5,000, a total of 200 are new transplants “living” in safe houses. That represents 4% of the population. If a sample size of 300 voters is to be used, you then know that 4% or 12 of those voters are already in the bag for one candidate. There would be, of course, other considerations, because in a population of 5000 voters, even in the best of times, actual turnout will never be 100 percent. But the candidate knows that whatever the final turnout percentage, his/her transplanted voters, sufficiently incentivized, will turnout. So then perhaps a higher weighting ought to be accorded to the transplanted voters.
For my part as a pollster, no firm decision as yet on how to deal with this evolving concern. And a concern it will be continue to be because I can say with certainty that this practice will continue and its practitioners will get more creative.
At present, with the incumbent PUP in the ascendancy, it is the UDP who are the complainants. In the not too distant past, the roles were reversed. I can also say with similar certainty, that whatever happens in Cayo North will not stay in Cayo North.
Dr. Philip J.Castillo
Assistant Professor
Faculty of Management & Social Sciences
University of Belize
Send comments to pjcastillobz@gmail.com