The Central Electoral Board (JCE) announced that municipal election results will be streamed as soon as 50% of the votes have been registered. Voting is from 7am to 5pm on Sunday, 16 February 2020. The JCE says that nevertheless, the vote count will be preliminary, pending for the completion of the vote tally. The opposition party, the Modern Revolutionary Party (PRM), had requested that the streaming start only once all the votes of a polling place were already registered so not to not influence the decision of those still in line to vote.
Some 158 municipalities will be electing city government officers. 7.2 million Dominicans are eligible to vote.
The president of the Central Electoral Board (JCE), Julio Castaños Guzmán, said that only those inside the polling place at 5pm will be allowed to vote. He said that in the case of stations using electronic voting machines, the vouchers of these votes will also be counted to confirm the electronic voting count before streaming the tally.
The coordinator for the civic watchdog group Citizen Participation, Heiromy Castro, said the organization is concerned that the JCE has chosen to transmit the data using a cell phone app. “So we have always heard that cell phones are very vulnerable, we know that a special electronic avenue is going to be used to send the data, but there is nothing infallible in life,” he reasoned, when commenting the issue with TV host Héctor Herrera Cabral on the D´Agenda program on Sunday, 9 February 2020 on Channel 11.
Read more in Spanish:
El Veedor Digital
CDN
N Digital
El Dia
10 February 2020