OAS Observer Mission Commends Belize’s Commitment to Democratic Process During Elections

A team sent by the Organization of American States (OAS) traveled across the country yesterday to observe the general elections. The OAS Observer Mission, a 12-member team with professionals from various backgrounds, visited polling stations on Wednesday to observe the voting process. They were also present inside counting stations when ballots were being counted. The team arrived in the country over the weekend and held meetings with the Elections and Boundaries Department, political parties, civil society organizations, and other stakeholders leading up to election day. At a press conference held just before two o’clock yesterday afternoon Chief of Mission Maricarmen Plata spoke on the work of the mission and commended the way the elections were being carried out.

Maricarmen Plata, ChieF, OAS Election Observer Mission: “We’ve been all over. We have the team deployed in different parts of the country so everybody has been observing and letting us know of the feedback of the different constituencies. For now we have seen a very calm election. We have seen good turnout but hopefully that will increase during the afternoon so we’re looking forward to seeing more people coming out this afternoon. There’s still a couple of hours left in the day. We basically met with the parties that are participating in the election, the political leaders and different stakeholders the authorities as well so we have been looking at different aspects such as technology, electoral processes, different aspects of the elections from the beginning, from the outset and then today.”

Interestingly, the OAS had recommended the redistricting exercise via a previous mission.  According to Plata, they are reviewing the current situation on redistricting which they will include in their report.

Maricarmen Plata, ChieF, OAS Election Observer Mission: “We are reviewing the present situation of that, that will be included also in our report. Of course I’ve been asking and following up on our prior recommendations and that will be included also in the record. We’ll be issuing a report at the end of the process, a preliminary report in the coming days and later on a full report. So definitely something that we’ll be looking into and reporting on. Well we have technical specialists with vast experience in reviewing electoral justice issues, technology issues, we’re also looking into campaign financing issues, different processes so it’s a team that’s quite knowledgeable and is able to look at the different areas. If you do see anybod-y wearing the vest you can reach out to those people and they will have a process to take in the report and consider that as well in the information that we are compiling. So this is the fourth time that the OAS observes an election here in Belize so part of the process is reviewing the past recommendations in all of these regards and then seeing how it’s come up since the last one. We did our last observation here in 2015 so we’ll definitely look at how different things have evolved since 2015 based on the information also we get from stakeholders, from the different political parties and authorities. So that’s something we will include in our report.”

The group is expected to present a summary report on the elections sometime soon with a full report in the coming weeks. The OAS Observer Mission was financed by the governments of Brazil, Canada, the Dominican Republic, Italy, Korea, the Netherlands, and Panama./