Yesterday Central Elections Board (JCE) President Morel Cerda accused Migration Director-General Danilo D?az of fabricating false voter identity cards ("cedulas") in order to discredit the JCE. He accused Migration of secretly using JCE’s own equipment to fabricate the cards. Counterfeiting cedulas is a "grave" criminal offense, he warned, and if the JCE had to take Migration officials to the courts to prove his charge, then so be it. He suggested that if Migration had to go to such lengths it only proved the JCE’s long-standing contention that getting a false cedula is only possible if JCE officials are bribed to do it, and there are safeguards against that.Morel Cerda also accused Migration and National Police (PN) agents of "practically kidnapping" a JCE employee, Juan Pe?a Gonz?lez, from the Bonao cedula processing center to pressure him into saying that he was delivering cedulas to people other than their owners for fraudulent uses.Lastly, Morel Cerda accused D?az of not carrying out an agreement with the JCE to create a joint inspection team to weed out any bad cedulas from the JCE registry and stop future cedula problems. The JCE has allowed three Migration inspectors to start working at JCE premises, but Migration refuses to accept JCE inspectors.Danilo D?az immediately denied and discounted both the counterfeiting and kidnapping charges, suggesting that Morel Cerda’s "gratuitous" accusations were attempt to undermine the impact of the JCE President’s public admission last week that the cedula program had problems. As for JCE employee Pe?a Gonz?lez, D?az said that he had been detained by Migration inspectors and PN officers on charges of having given a cedula to someone other than its real owner for the purpose of that person entering the U.S. under a false identity. That, he said, is a grave crime Migration will stop wherever it finds it.Yesterday was simply the latest chapter in what has become a war of words and accusations and counter-accusations between the JCE and the Directorate-General of Migration. Three weeks ago D?az accused the JCE of issuing cedulas to Haitians and other aliens. After repeated JCE challenges to prove his charges, D?az traveled last week to the Board to present "irrefutable proof." In the face of the evidence offered by D?az, JCE President Morel Cerda said that (a) it did appear that the JCE had issued cedulas to foreign nationals; (b) he would investigate the problem, weed out the bad cards, punish any JCE employees found to have acted improperly; (c) JCE would establish with Migration a program to clean up the cedula registry and prevent future frauds. Earlier this week D?az said that the admission of problems, when combined with the low rate (about 10%) of Dominican voters issued new cedulas so far, called for the JCE to abandon plans to insist on the new cedula as the only acceptable proof of voter identity for the May 16, 2000 elections.
