President Leonel Fern?ndez will receive judges of the Junta Central Electoral today at the National Palace. The JCE is seeking an additional RD$92 million from the government. The government had conditioned the disbursement of the additional funds to the recommendations made by CAPEL, an organization that does this kind of work in Latin America with the endorsement of the Organization of American States. When the initial results were out, the JCE discredited these by denouncing that one of the CDs containing data had been tampered with. The CAPEL audit looked into procedures around the issuing of voting and identification cards. The audit found that management problems and disorganization at the JCE was one of the main causes of the delays in the process of providing new voting cards to four million Dominicans. The process has been affected by technical difficulties caused by deficiencies in the service provided by Datocentro, the company that won the bid to issue the new voting cards. Political analyst Orlando Gil, of El Siglo newspaper, speculates that insiders within the JCE could have done the tampering in order to tarnish the audit and discredit its results that did not favor work carried out so far by the board of the JCE. "Only that way can one explain the lack of interest of the electoral court in establishing what happened with the CD," he says. The leading political parties recently announced their support to the JCE process of issuing voting cards. The political parties have committed to motivate their followers to sign up for the new cards. The JCE needs to get about three millions to renew their cards by the end of this year.
