off yesterday over the issue of what type of constitutional reform was best for Bermuda.

Although no resolution was reached at the two-hour long forum, the audience was treated to historical and sometimes emotive presentations on the origins of the impasse.

In the end, one panelist, Mr. Jeff Conyers of First Bermuda Securities, concluded that before Bermuda begins to consider Independence, the whole issue of voting districts needed to be resolved.

Former Opposition Leader Mrs. Lois Browne Evans said Bermudians must not accept anything less than a change in the current political arrangements so that each person can have one vote of equal value.

However, anti-independence crusader and former Cabinet minister the Hon. Ann Cartwright Decouto said that any move away from the current set-up would be fraught with problems.

"It may be a glib thing to say one (person), one vote,'' she said. "But I don't know of one country in the world where voting districts are drawn with that kind of precision.'' Moreover, she said the present system allowed both parties to take some of the larger constituencies as well as the smaller ones.

Consequently, she asserted that the gerrymandering charge leveled against the UBP -- the drawing up of voting districts to ensure a certain result -- was not true.

And Mrs. Cartwright Decouto said that if a decision was made not to use the parishes as the dividing lines, an immediate problem, coping with population shifts which would upset the previous equality of the new districts, would be the next headache.

And to resolve this issue, costly census personnel would be needed to ensure that each district had equal numbers of voters for every election.

But Mr. Walton Brown Jr., chairman of the Committee for the Independence of Bermuda, argued that a necessary precondition of democracy for Bermuda involved getting rid of the present system because it was a reflection of racism.

He said that historically the dual seat constituency allowed the ruling party to run a black and a white candidate in marginal areas, which seared race right into the process.

Mr. Brown said that a system of one person one vote of equal value was an important objective for Bermudians to work toward as they think about Independence.

When asked what they would each do if they woke up the day after the referendum and found out that Bermudians had voted yes, each panelist, except Mrs. Browne Evans, said they would be prepared to work to reach some kind of consensus.

But Mrs. Browne Evans said her party wanted constitutional reform first and foremost because they are unprepared to accept any new constitution based on the same process.