Lobby group the Association for Due Process and the Constitution yesterday insisted that its role in the ongoing electoral reform process is to protect the public's interest.

Responding to comments by pollster Walton Brown this week that the two political parties had far more legitimacy than the Association, the group's Secretary Warren Cabral said that Mr. Brown's own polls had established its legitimacy.

"He (Mr. Brown) is our pollster and he himself has established the legitimacy of the Association by way of conducting three separate polls over two years each of which confirm that 75 percent of the electorate support the position of the Association," said Mr. Cabral.

"What greater legitimacy does he want ? It far exceeds the percentages of either political party in the last election."

Further, he argued, the political parties had their own interests to protect, but the Association was representing the "disinterested public".

Earlier this week the Association accused Boundaries Commission members of breaking the law by not releasing software used to generate the recommended electoral map.

Mr. Brown, asked for his views, told this newspaper that having the public help to design the boundaries was an "unworkable" and "impractical" proposition.

As far as Mr. Cabral is concerned Mr. Brown's statement is "unsubstantiated".

It was "wholly practical", he argued, given the resources available to the Association.

"The fact is that the Association is representative of a large bloc of the public and has for the past year engaged the services of two professors, one from the University of Oxford and the other from the University of Manchester, both experts in electoral systems and these people are more than capable of interpreting the data and coming up with boundaries allocations. But they need the software to do the job."

He said that one of the experts, Clive Payne, was a renowned psephologist and "the exact peer" and a close colleague, of Ron Johnstone a psephologist hired by the Commission.

"This is all to say that the Association had the ability to make independent submissions to the Boundaries Commission and it is ill-informed to say otherwise. The Association possesses exactly the same personnel and intellectual ability to deal with this issue. All we are missing is the software. And we speak for a large number of the electorate, if Mr. Brown's own poll is anything to go by."

Mr. Brown could not be reached for comment yesterday.