"Fraud" is a word heard frequently both before and after Dominican elections, and the current campaign season is no exception. PRSC party leader and former SD District Attorney, Alexis Joaquin Castillo, charged that every act of the Central Elections Board (JCE) accords with "the directives" of the PRD party. Castillo referred to the "distortion and dislocation" of the voter registration lists and the assignment to voting districts and polling stations. Castillo said that he fully agrees with last week’s statement by PLD spokesman Euclides Gutierrez Felix that the JCE is attempting to force voter abstention by its laggard distribution of registration cards (cedulas). Prominent attorney and inveterate gadfly, Marino Vinicio Castillo (no relation to Alexis Joaquin Castillo), went even further in charging that "since they were chosen" the JCE judges have acted like "a neighborhood committee of the PRD." Five of the seven JCE judges are widely regarded to be PRD party stalwarts. Castillo, who also currently serves as the nation’s anti-drug czar, pointed to the inadequate monitoring of the voter rosters, the relocation of 360,000 eligible voters from their regular voting districts, and the failure to issue tens of thousands of voter registration cards, as evidence of a "total fraud." The May 16th elections, he affirmed, will be "a slaughterhouse for the country." Meanwhile, the JCE announced that a test of the electoral computer system, carried out in 84 of the 115 municipal voting districts, was successful. The test was a "dry run" for the new high speed network commissioned by the JCE from Codetel, the major local phone company and a subsidiary of GTE. The new equipment will allow for instantaneous and simultaneous receipt of polling station tabulations at JCE headquarters, according to Huascar Frias, the JCE’s head of information systems, whereas, "it used to take 20 minutes." Previous years’ election results have been known to take days to tabulate, but the JCE has offered assurances that this year’s election results will be published the same day. The JCE also announced that with a final printing of 161,000 pending voter registration cards, which have been shipped to various distribution points, it has now concluded the emission of new cards. Numerous voters have been hard pressed to obtain their cards, returning repeatedly to JCE offices and leaving empty-handed. According to the JCE, over 4,021,000 were distributed prior to January 31st, the original deadline. April 10th was established as the extended deadline.
