Page 76 - Anatomy-of-a-Fraud

The serious charges publicly leveled by the PDC representative at the 4-4
Circuit Returns Board could be –and indeed, still are– easily verifiable. If the circuit
tally sheet submitted to the National Returns Board had in fact been stolen and did not
include the signatures or the fingerprints of the Circuit Return Board, a simple
handwriting test and a check of the prints would reveal any irregularities committed.
In addition, the official precinct tally sheets –there were only 66 of them–, whose
results the spurious document purportedly represented, could have been compared
against the copies held by the other parties. Under the Electoral Code, these other
copies have identical evidentiary value. The charges were concrete and specific and
had to do with a relatively small number of votes. Investigating them was not a difficult
task, much less an insurmountable one. More importantly the election of the president,
considering the awfully close results, might have hinged on the truth of the charges.

In view of these irregularities, Dr. Rubén Arosemena Guardia, a prominent
local jurist, and a leader of the Christian Democratic Party, challenged the validity of
the results from Circuit 4-4 and filed a petition to have them set aside. It should be
mentioned that the Christian Democratic Party, as Justice Murgas himself would admit
in one of the documents dealing with this petition –had not been guilty of filing
arbitrary legal actions during the campaign.

Among other, the document filed by Arosemena denounced the following
irregularities:

a). “Electoral officials assigned to several precincts in Circuit 4-4 refused
to hand copies of the tally sheets to PDC precincts representatives”. (The
PDC was the ADO member that had more precinct representatives in that

remote electoral circuit. By denying it copies of the tally sheets, the
results could be altered, and the opposition would not have any evidence
that a fraud had been committed).

b). “Unofficial voter registration rolls distributed by the Liberal Party –a
member of the UNADE– were used at several precincts”. (There were the
factitious lists, very likely generated by the Electoral Tribunal’s
computers during the time, back on the night of May 4, when they were
under the direct control of the Defense Forces).
And yet, despite the seriousness of the charges and the relative ease with which

they could be ascertained; despite its momentous implications, the professional prestige
of the lawyer filing the petition and of the unquestionable probity of the petitioning