The president of the Central Electoral Board, Luis Arias, has said that late birth declarations are a “national calamity”, and promised that the creation of a new unit of the JCE would deal exclusively with the problem. At the same time, according to El Caribe, Arias denied that there were as many as two million people in the country who are not in possession of legal documents due to the lack of a birth certificate. Arias said, “If in the latest census there were eight million or so people, and at the JCE we have voter registration records for 5.3 million people, it is not logical that there can be two million people without documents.” Magistrate Roberto Rosario told reporters that the World Bank would be providing US$20 million in order for the JCE to create a specialized department that will deal exclusively with the problem of late birth records.