The Credibility of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal is Questioned, October 6 2008

ContraPunto
October 6 2008

Concern increases daily. As the electoral process of 2009 intensifies in El Salvador, the credibility and impartiality of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE) declines.

Civic organizations in the country have been active in questioning the transparency of the TSE. There are multiple concerns, although the TSE itself assures that it acts under the strongest guidelines of legality and impartiality.

Citizens Action for Democracy (ACD), a group made of almost 10 Salvadoran non-governmental organizations, says that it does not trust the decisions that the TSE makes. The ACD affirms that the TSE´s decisions are debilitating the credibility of the electoral process.

Some manoeuvres that the ACD is concerned about are: the separation of the dates of the municipal and national elections, the cancellation of the requirement that each ballot be stamp and signed by the Vote Receiving Board at the polls, and the fact that the TSE distributed the elections of local representatives between municipalities without using the data about the population of each region from the most recent census.

The civil organizations of the ACD say that these changes in electoral law are created in the interest of the governing party National Republican Alliance (ARENA). The President of the TSE, Walter Araujo, is a member of the ARENA party. 

¨The TSE is not creating confidence in the electoral process. It is putting the credibility of the results of the 2009 elections at risk, and this is a delicate matter,¨ lamented Giovanni Chicas, member of the ACD.

Although last December the Organization of American States (OAE) did an audit of the electoral process of 2009, and a higher scale of international observation is planned for the upcoming elections, these actions are considered ¨insufficient¨ for guaranteeing credible and transparent elections.

¨The electoral system has little credibility, it is a tribunal of political parties and the president of the tribunal identifies too strongly with ARENA,¨ said political analyst Robert Rubio.

For ACD, overturning the requirement that a signature and stamp be on the voting ballots ruins the transparency of the vote. Separating the elections and not using the 2007 census are attempts to tilt the electoral results to the right, to the party that is currently in government. This is the first time since 1994 that the governing party sees a true threat that the opposition party, the FMLN, will come to power. ¨The actions of the TSE are incongruent and wear away the credibility of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal, ¨ said Giovanni Chicas.

Due to the little credibility that the TSE has, the polarization, and the expected results of the 2009 elections, the University Institute of Public Opinion (IUDOP) will implement an observation project for the 2009 elections that will be based on a method of observation and rapid counting on a national level.

The process consist of sending hundreds of volunteers to monitor the voting process and count votes in specific voting centres, registering key information in standardized forms and reporting their observations to a central location of the collection of data.

The project is financed by the National Democratic Institute (NDI), with the assistance of other international sources.

Rafael Roncalgiolo, president of the Institute for Democracy and Electoral Participation, (IDEA) from Peru, assured that this observation ¨is a form that the citizens have to assure the electoral results.¨

Roncagliolo said that these mechanisms help the electoral tribunals emit accurate results, and that the margin of error offered by this independent observation is from .5 to 1%,  from the international experience of countries that have used this mechanism, created by civic activists.

¨The existence of this independent information discourages fraud and displays the fraud when it does happen, because it is independent analysis,¨ said Roncaglioilo.

Cristina Amaya
ContraPunto
Translated by US-El Salvador Sister Cities