Fraud is not the result, fraud is the system, wrote Ines Aizpun, managing editor of Diario Libre on 10 October 2019. In the editorial, she focused on how Dominican taxpayers have had to pay RD$3 billion to help political parties choose their candidates.
“They are primary elections. It’s not the general elections, even though the tantrum of the loser has spread the electoral fraud syndrome to an entire country. Before it was the sticks and the theft of ballot boxes, now the algorithm,” she writes.
“Fraud is not the result, it is the system. The money that candidates must move to appear on party lists. The money to move people to vote, the purchase of ballots (system as rudimentary as improbable)… That is what makes this democracy undemocratic,” says the editorialist.
“Yes, it is true that the reality that the state sometimes helps a candidate to win and at other times prevents the triumph is a problem. That is a fraud. Sometimes we like it, and sometimes we don’t…” she concludes.
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Diario Libre
14 October 2019