Page 66 - Anatomy-of-a-Fraud

with the Electoral Registry had been duly certified by the proper authorities as a prior
requirement for their candidacies, did not appear on the official rolls on election day?
Was it a mere case of computer error or a fraudulent purging of numerous opposition
voters from the rolls?
There are clear and precise indications that the official rolls were tampered
with. In relating this incident, we are addressing, for the first time, the issue of the
electoral fraud per se. The fraud was committed like this: “… days before the balloting,
[Electoral Tribunal officials] armed with computers compared voter registration rolls
against party lists and proceeded to drop from each precinct’s roll the names of 20 to
25 opposition sympathizers. Right then and there they lopped off between eighty and
23
one hundred thousand votes from Arias’s total…”.
The numerous victims of this “cybernetic fraud” are the best proof that, in
fact, final voter registration rolls did not include the names of thousands of known
opposition supporters. Indeed, it happened in more than one instance that a voter
appeared in the general rolls used to determine precinct numbers but when appeared at
his precinct, his name was not included in the final roll.

Opposition parties had had an inkling of this tampering. The first tentative
results of the 1982 electoral census failed to account for more than 5,000 registered
members of the Christian Democratic Party and more than 9,000 MOLIRENA
members.

But, as we shall presently see, the “cybernetic” fraud was not limited to
dropping voters; it added quite a few too.

The Electoral Code provides that certain civil servant, due to the jobs they
must perform on election day, are allowed to vote at a precinct other than their assigned
one. For instance, a national guardsman residing in San Miguelito district would
normally vote in that area. But if on election day he is on duty at National Guard
Headquarters, he is allowed to vote at a precinct near the barracks. This is quite logical,
but it lends itself to double voting. And that is exactly what happened.

Government agencies whose employees qualified to vote outside their
precincts –physicians, firemen, national guardsmen, for instance– were required to
furnish a list of their names to the Electoral Tribunal no later than 20 days before the
elections. The Tribunal, in turn, was to relay these names to the political parties in a
“Special Listing”, at least 10 days prior to the elections. The parties would thus have
sufficient time to alert their precinct workers to the fact that there would be a certain
number of voters not included in their rolls and to prevent these voters from casting
more than one ballot.

On Tuesday, April 24, nine days after the date on which government agencies
were supposed to have furnished their lists of names to the Electoral Tribunal, Electoral

23 “En Pocas Palabras”, La Prensa, May 20, 1984, page 8C.