A group of 13 deputies partial to the PRD factions of President Mejia, Vice President Milagros Ortiz Bosch and former Tourism Minister Rafael Subervi Bonilla presented the Chamber of Deputies with a new bill, a takeoff of the initial, and highly contentious, Ley de Lemas proposal presented in January by PRD Deputy Henry Sarraff. Sarraff himself is one of the proponents of the new bill prepared by Tirso Mejia Ricart, a former deputy. Mejia Ricart is currently the executive director of the Consejo Nacional de Reforma del Estado, a government department that oversees state reforms. The new proposal calls for important changes to Electoral Law 275-95, despite the fact that the election date is 16 May and the deadline for the presentation of presidential candidacies is 15 March, less than two months away. The bill proposes changeds to allow that each political party present as many as five candidates for the presidency on their ballot, each with their respective vice-presidential candidates. Diario Libre highlights that the bill submitted to the deputies includes provisions whereby only 20% approval of the members of the political parties’ directorates of the political parties is needed for the presentation of candidacies to the Presidency. The present law obliges the signature of the president of the party on the bill. As president of the party, Hatuey de Camps firmly opposes the reelection of President Hipolito Mejia and disputes a recent ruling of the Electoral Board (JCE) that opened the registration of new contenders for a future PRD primary. Furthermore, a change in the Electoral Law so that the new proposed law would override any other electoral or political law presently in existence is included. The proposal would also enable any party that has already registered its candidacy for the 2004 presidential election to submit up to four more candidacies. The PRSC and PLD have already done so. The Tirso Mejia Ricart proposal establishes that in case no candidate reaches 50%+1 of the vote to win in a first round, a second round would be held, with a showdown between the top two candidates from the two parties that have received the most valid votes in the first round. This proposal differs only slightly from Saraff’s bill (the Ley de Lemas) presented earlier in Congress, as it does not establish that the candidate with the most votes would receive the added votes of the other candidates of the party.
The political solution has been criticized by church, business and civic society groups as a tailor-made way to resolve what are otherwise internal problems within the ruling PRD party. The PRD has stagnated over who will run for the Presidency on behalf of the party, after President Hipolito Mejia announced his intention to run for a second term and his opponents within the party argued that he is using state resources irregularly to compete against them in the yet-to-be held primary to choose the PRD candidate. The PRSC and the PLD have already registered their single candidacies. Thus, the proposals to change the electoral law this spring have met with unanimous rejection from Dominican institutions outside of the PRD and the government. Even the president of the Central Electoral Board, Luis Arias, has said there is no time to adequately implement the changes. The opposition focuses on what they feel is an absurdity, attempting to resolve the internal problems of one single party at the expense of the taxpayers, saying the untimeliness of the situation and the complications in its implementation could very well derail the elections altogether.