Yesterday, Sunday, 22 May 2016, a week after the general election was held on 15 May 2016, the JCE had still not posted the final election results. Bulletin 11 issued on Sunday evening showed that 97.86 % of the presidential election vote had been completed; 88.67% of the legislative and 94.21% of the municipal vote count. Major technical flaws have tainted the vote count technology contracted by the JCE at a cost of US$31 million. The opposition has been reporting fraud and serious irregularities.
The debate is not about the presidential vote, where no one disputes that President Danilo Medina won his bid for re-election, but about the legislative and municipal elections in several provinces.
Listin Diario reports that the main problem with the elections was the introduction of a new electronic system for transmitting the vote count that failed, with the implementation of the manual vote that led to widespread confusion when early votes were transmitted.
Juan Bolivar Diaz, writing in Acento says that “the failures were due to the collapse of the costly automation imposed against all reason by the sole uni-personal authoritarianism of the dominating party that brought anarchy to the election, and has delayed the completion of the poll, as was acknowledged by national and international electoral observation teams.”
Diario Libre editor, meanwhile, Adriano Miguel Tejada called for “political realism,” when the candidates, both winners and losers know how many votes they obtained, because they were counted manually and the delegates received a copy of the totals. These totals, nevertheless, have not yet been made official by the JCE.
Writing about the weak institutional aspects of the elections in Diario Libre, Pedro Silverio Alvarez conveyed the opinion of the OAS observer mission, which pointed out that the implementation of new technology during the election was plagued by serious problems, including the fact that the technicians were neither adequately trained in the use of nor familiar enough with the equipment, the voting sites lacked the infrastructure for operating the equipment, insufficient human resources for managing the equipment, and a failure in the security code recognition.
During the general election of 15 May 2016, 26 political parties contested elected posts at the presidential, legislative and municipal levels. The country voted for 32 senators and 190 legislators. At the municipal level, 3,842 posts were up for election.
http://www.listindiario.com/la-republica/2016/05/22/420202/pais-espera-desenlace-a-ocho-dias-de-comicios
http://acento.com.do/2016/politica/8351195-notable-retroceso-democratico-colapso-la-automatizacion-analisis-juan-bolivar-diaz/
http://www.diariolibre.com/opinion/en-directo/institucionalidad-cuestionada-BY3742663
