The president of the Central Electoral Board (JCE), Manuel Ramon Morel Cerda, told El Caribe newspaper in an extensive interview today that an electronic attempt to tamper with the 2000 presidential elections was identified following FBI investigations. The FBI intervened because a US citizen, along with several well-known Dominicans, was an alleged participant in the fraud. He said it was never made public in order to avoid a scandal on election day, the day the plot was discovered. Morel Cerda also spoke of an attempt to boycott what he called the logistics of the event during the 2000 presidential election and during the 2002 congressional and municipal election. He explained that the idea was to paralyze certain voting stations so they could not open. He did not name the political party that would have benefitted. In the interview, he acknowledged the use of the ?little stick technique?, whereby one digit is added to the official results to increase the votes in favor of a particular candidate. He said this occurred in both the elections in Santiago and the National District (Santo Domingo) and specified that 106 official voting acts were tampered with in Santo Domingo to favor the PRD. He criticized the PLD for never having protested these illegal acts, while being very vocal about the use of the technique in the Santiago election.
?Politics are becoming every day more of a kind of marketplace, where government matters and people are marketed,? he said, while denying he was up for sale, too.
Morel Cerda is optimistic there will be no fraud in the 2004 presidential elections, and says that, in any case, the JCE has mechanisms to detect such acts.