Crime group’s referendum delayed

“We are still in the process of organising the ballots. There has been a slight glitch in printing and nobody has received his ballot as yet,” Cadiz said.

He said the committee is using the Elections and Boundaries Commission’s list of registered voters, which it purchased to mail out the ballots.

According to the EBC list, there are some 950,000 registered voters and each one of these persons will receive a ballot from the Keith Noel Committee inviting him to vote on three key issues — crime, poverty and leadership.

Cadiz is sceptical about the EBC list, however.

“I don’t think it’s totally correct. Seventy-five percent out of a population of 1.5 million are of the voting age? It sounds a bit skewed,” he observed.

But the committee is going ahead with the list and once the ballots are sent out, the voting process is expected to run into weeks, which may take even longer due to the late start.

Cadiz said while the referendum has the effect of a general election, the committee has only a fraction of the kind of resources a political party would use in one.

“Our funding really comes from John Public and we have received only dribs and drabs. We have had no actual cash inflows. We are mailing out ballots to every eligible voter with only a fraction of the funding a political party would have.”

He said while the committee is waiting on the ballots to be printed, a lot of non-registered voters have voted in the referendum but they “cannot really accept that as being the vote.

However, Cadiz was confident about what the referendum will achieve at the end of the day and said the response to it, which they got from telemarketing, has been tremendous.

“Telemarketing is randomly picking names in the telephone book and calling people and asking them if they know about the referendum and if they would support it.

“We have a whole bank of telemarketers doing this for us and the response has been tremendous,” Cadiz claimed.

“I think the referendum is like a breath of fresh air. There’s no race, no party symbol. It’s true democracy.”