Page 80 - Anatomy-of-a-Fraud

May 9; that Barletta’s lead was spurious, at least by 3,600 votes; and that therefore the
winner of the 1984 presidential elections had been Arias and not Barletta.

For obvious reasons, this investigation was never conducted. What they did
instead was to invoke an obsolete and little used statutory law rule and proclaim
Barletta the winner by 1,713 votes.

And Barletta would later say time and again that he had won fair and square!

C. He who counts also elects.

Article 131 of the Electoral Code provides that the members of the electoral
bodies appointed by the Electoral Tribunal, i.e., the chairman, the secretary, the third
board member and their respective alternates, must be persons standing for a
“guarantee of impartiality”. It is only logical that this should be so, for the honesty of
the returns depends, to a considerable extent, upon their integrity.

There was a total of 3,943 electoral bodies, broken down as follows: 3,902
precincts, 40 circuit boards and the National Returns Board. The Electoral Tribunal,
therefore, required the services of 23,568 officials. Most of them were civil servants
and this fact tended to make them more or less biased towards the UNADE. Vote
counting at the precinct level was fairly honest, at least in urban areas. The lack of
impartiality was more noticeable at the circuit board level. An example of this partial
behavior was already noted in Chapter One when discussing events at the Soná circuit
board. As a rule, Tribunal officials at this level were heads of ministerial departments,
official corporations, the National Bank, etc. As a rule, also, they were both members
of supporters of the PRD. For instance, in Circuit 8-8 (which includes Bella Vista,
Ancón, Betania, Pueblo Nuevo), the third member of the circuit board was a known
member of the PRD Civil Servants Front at the Hydraulic Resources and Power
Network Institute (IRHE, in Spanish). Thus, Article 131 of the Electoral Code was also
violated with impunity by the authorities during this electoral process.

What was the behavior of the official members of the highest return body, the
National Returns Board? Did they stand for a “guarantee of impartiality” as required
by law? Or, to the contrary, were they one more tool used by the regime to pull off its
fraud?
Let us attempt to answer these questions with a description of the men and
women who performed this historic role.