2004News

JCE cannot review electoral rolls

Hoy reported on Saturday that it has neither the time nor the money to review all the photographs on the electoral rolls to weed out duplicates. The chief judge of the Administrative Chamber, Nelson Gomez, told reporters that an audit of the photographic images, something that he himself had requested be done several months ago, would take a year to carry out and would cost around US$20 million. Nonetheless, Gomez did not dismiss the possibility of “random” inspections of the images. This idea has been proposed by judges Rafaelina Peralta and Rafael Diaz Vasquez. In this way, only about 300,000 of the potential 5 million electors would be verified. Gomez also referred to the work done by the citizen’s group Participacion Ciudadana, which discovered that 1% of voters are listed at the wrong polling centers.