Guillermo Moreno of minority party Alianza Pais, which obtained 1.7% of the vote and won a seat in Congress (Fidelio Despradel, national deputy), said he would not congratulate President Danilo Medina on his re-election. He said the irregularities throughout the process meant that the election did not have legitimacy.
In his speech, Moreno stated that three days after the election, there is still no full result, just dozens of accusations that the voting had been manipulated with fraud and significant discrepancies, several deaths after the vote, shootings, recounting of votes and other irregularities that put the transparency and credibility of the process into question.
“I hold the JCE judges and their president responsible for this process, for stubbornly imposing electronic vote counting in violation of electoral law, knowing that the scanners had not arrived on time, that they did not have the necessary staff, that neither a due audit nor pilot test was carried out and that many places did not have an Internet connection for operating the scanners,” he said.
He said that stubbornness had prevailed and criticized the JCE for releasing preliminary results despite an agreement with the political parties that they would not release electronic data before the manual vote count results, which led to chaos after the vote.
He said that President Danilo Medina’s re-election has undermined the precarious democratic institutions like never before and thus he does not deserve his congratulations. He recalled that unscrupulous legislators had to be bought, and many of them have now been re-elected, for the Constitution to be amended to allow for re-election. Then, the re-election campaign made unlimited use of public funds, the ministries were put to work for his re-election, there was buyout or division of opposition political parties, the main media were paid to serve the cause, and on election day itself a market for the purchase of IDs was unfolded using millions of pesos.
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