Participacion Ciudadana, the leading civil society think tank, says it will have 400 observers on duty at the 18 February municipal elections. Fatima Lorenzo, executive director, Leidy Blanco, coordinator of the organization’s political parties unit and Miriam Diaz, member of PC participated in an interview with El Caribe director, Nelson Rodriguez and CDN reporters Julissa Cespedes and Katherine Hernandez.
The spokespeople for the civic movement Citizen Participation told the media group that regarding the setup and organization of next Sunday’s elections by the Central Electoral Board (JCE), the entire process is going well. They called for citizens to vote in the municipal elections.
“As an institution, and looking at the entire process of the Central Electoral Board, everything is ready in the part that has to do with the organization, according to the calendar and according to the information that the Board has been presenting,” said Fátima Lorenzo, executive director for Participación Ciudadana.
“We as Citizen Participation are going to be observing the development of the process, the incidents that arise, the behavior of the population, how the technology is used, which seems to be very well structured. We understand that nothing is going to happen on Sunday outside of the incidents that may occur in an electoral process,” noted Lorenzo.
Lorenzo said that on this occasion, Citizen Participation would not be doing a quick count on the results of the elections. “The system that the JCE is implementing is quite transparent. There may be failures in places, but in terms of transmission and speed, it is difficult to compete with that, and it is not easy to set up that quick count,” she explained.
The Citizen Participation executives also called on the population to vote in Sunday’s municipal elections and to exercise their vote in a conscious and well-informed manner.
PC, nevertheless, says that there has been a lack of information and guidance to citizens on how to vote, with the campaign happening only in the last stretch. Leidy Blanco, of PC, said this is a role that the political need also to play. Political parties receive billions from taxpayer money.
Fatima Lorenzo explained that the PC has an online platform where citizens can report electoral crimes and situations nationwide. The platform works with a team that evaluates the facts and then uploads them to a platform so that people can see what is being reported.
“The important thing about this is that we have an agreement with the Special Prosecutor for Electoral Crimes so that the Public Ministry can evaluate which of these complaints have indications that a process can be initiated,” said Fátima Lorenzo. Lorenzo says this is the place for reporting electoral crimes such as purchase and sale of ID cards.
Regarding political candidate screening, Miriam Diaz of PC said they did not accept the proposal made by the ruling Modern Revolutionary Party for PC to screen the PRM list of candidates.
“We decided that even if they sent us (the list), we were not going to do that work. First, because we cannot deviate from the objectives of the organization to work on something else that does not correspond to us, we are a relatively small civil society organization, we do not have an army of people to do that,” she explained.
The second reason that Díaz presented for not purging the political candidates is that the party could have done this same job. Díaz considered that political parties have not made enough efforts to prevent organized crime money from penetrating the organizations.
“Having such expensive and long campaigns obviously allows organized crime to enter,” said Leidy Blanco.
Blanco said that the parties should work to better select their candidates.
On the other hand, for the Citizen Participation executives, the transparency of public spending is the main tool to avoid political clientelism. Diaz said that the announced educational bonus of a RD$1,000 at the end of the school year is clientelism.
The representatives of Citizen Participation considered that in the context of the municipal campaigns, it is difficult to quantify the use of public resources to favor the official party.
“On the one hand we show advances in democracy that should make us feel happy because in many other countries it is going backwards, however we need to organize and reduce the costs of campaigns with resources from the state and other non-governmental sources,” she commented.
Lorenzo criticized the significant increase in the advertising chapter without there being any extraordinary element that could justify the increase.
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El Caribe
14 February 2024