Divorce referendum voting kicks off

Archbishop Cremona cast his vote in Attard’s primary school, the only voting office for the entire locality. Voting attendance was relatively sparse, but consistent, as people trickled in early. Police presence was relatively high, and media were not allowed within 50 metres of the voting office.

The voting will go on until 10 pm tonight. Vote counting will take place tomorrow at the Mediterranean Conference Centre in Valletta. The voting sorting process is expected to begin at 10am, and results are expected within the following two hours. 

Earlier this month, Cremona had emphasised that the Church would not conducting a crusade against divorce intended simply to fulfill its role to spread the word of Christ and its message about the family.

Despite this, the Church issued, among other things, a 12-point missive to Maltese and Gozitan households warning voters that abusive husbands ‘will have the right to remarry’ and that Catholics would lose the right to communion and confession should they vote in favour of the introduction of divorce legislation.

As the referendum campaign came to a close on Thursday, perhaps one of the most interesting phenomena is the relatively high number of votes that remained uncollected.

The final number of uncollected documents reached 20,775, comprising 6.4% of the persons registered to vote in this referendum. The number of uncollected votes is roughly four times as high as that in the last referendum on Malta’s accession into the European Union.

In total, according to last October’s electoral register, 325,103 people were entitled to the right to vote in this referendum.

The figure excludes the controversial 2,800 ‘lost’ votes of those young adults who turned 18 between now and last October – the focus of a squabble between Government and the Opposition over whose fault it was that they were not included into the electoral register in time for the divorce referendum.