The JCE has decided that women will vote in the first session on election day following the new closed college voting scheme established by the modified electoral law. The president of the Junta Central Electoral, Dr. César Estrella Sadhalá, said on television last week that an estimated 3,700,000 people have the vote in the Dominican Republic, of which fifty percent minus eight thousand are men.
The women’s voting session starts at 6 am, and the men’s at 1 pm. He said the decision for the women to go first was taken because they feel that any interruptions or problems that occur in the morning will be resolved more easily with the women who, he described, are “more mild and manageable” than the men.
He said the new system of closed colleges will allow the first voters to be home earlier. This is because the lines will be smaller at the voting centers. A maximum of 600 voters per center will be eligible to vote, which means that there will be approximately 300 people per session. He estimates that all of them should be registered in two hours and twenty minutes after which, the colleges would close. With the voting registry forms completed, the actual voting begins.
This system guarantees that it is impossible for someone to vote more than once as there would not be enough time for them to register at a center, go on line and vote, clean their hands and try to register at another station.