Editorial, The f-word

Fraud. Guillermo Endara brought it up, and now Ricardo Martinelli has echoed the concern. The Mireyistas, for their part, get indignant at the utterance of the word and Martín Torrijos says he’s not too worried about it.

And of course, the defenders of the political status quo tend to dismiss such talk of election fraud as the rantings of a crazy ex-president or of a supermarket baron who is about to be humiliated in his quixotic race for the presidency. They point out all the various safeguards that have been built into the system, like how the three Electoral Tribunal magistrates are from different parties, how they will command the police on Election Day and so on.

And yet we see:

• Despite a clear ban on the use of government resources for campaigning and prior Electoral Tribunal decisions that public employees can’t campaign during working hours, Mireya Moscoso flouting those rules by issuing an ex post facto day off to a cabinet member so as to give him an excuse for campaigning during the working day;

• The flagrantly rigged process by which Mireya Moscoso made José Miguel Alemán the Arnulfista presidential nominee, against the will of most party members;

• A number of voters’ photos having disappeared from the Electoral Tribunal’s files;

• No sure determination of the extent or purposes of the diversion of the old UNISYS cedula forms to the black market --- sure, that particular problem seems to have been fixed, but we have never had a proper investigation into whether there was a political component to the scam;

• Nepotism alive, well and flagrant in Electoral Tribunal contracting and hiring decisions, which calls into question the overall credibility of the entire institution;

• The unpunished precedent of the 1999 campaign, in which supporters of Martín Torrijos removed nearly an entire edition of La Prensa from circulation because it contained a poll that showed Mireya Moscoso overtaking the PRD candidate;

• That in past two elections, which despite being clean to the extent that the candidates with the most votes for president were declared the winners, there were indications of fraud that may have affected the composition of the Legislative Assembly;

• The precedent established by the Electoral Tribunal that it will not investigate apparent fraud, leaving it to the person who complains to produce complete proof that there was fraud and that it affected the outcome of a particular race;

• The Electoral Tribunal’s palpable discriminatory attitude toward independents, salient examples being the heavy-handed ban on the top independent elected in 1999, now-deposed La Chorrera Mayor Brenda de Icaza, from participating in this year’s election because she improperly refused to rehire a city employee who had taken time off to run for the legislature, and the tribunal’s refusal to look into a situation that bore the hallmarks of election officials’ refusal to count votes for an independent candidate for mayor of Colon in some precincts last time; and

• The Electoral Tribunal’s adoption of historical revisionism as the law of the land by prohibiting the publication of photos showing Guillermo Endara with Arnulfo Arias, whom Endara served as a key aide for many years.

Let us therefore be on guard against election fraud this May, whether on the breathtaking scale of declaring a distant third-place candidate the next president or on the more feasible levels of retaining parties that should by law lose their official status or altering the proper composition of the next Legislative Assembly.

The truth of the matter is that, although the processes in 1994 and 1999 were clean when compared to what Yolanda de Pulice tried to do in 1989 and the heist that Noriega pulled in 1985, many of Panama’s election procedures still lend themselves to fraud. The burning of ballots is said to safeguard the secrecy of suffrage, but it also makes recounts impossible when actas are falsified or altered. The partisan veto power over vote counters --- this year exercised by the Arnulfista Party --- could combine with the nepotism employed by the Electoral Tribunal to bias decisions in favor of a class of people who degrade democracy into a crooked little game. Restrictions on the early reporting of results and the publication of Election Eve opinion polls or Election Day exit polls may serve to limit certain forms of manipulation and election-related violence, but they can also serve to prohibit free speech and public indignation in the face of an electoral hijacking. The arcane rules by which winners are declared in multi-member legislative districts slow the vote counts and lend themselves to mischief.

People should not and The Panama News does not predict fraud, but on the other hand it is unreasonable to rule out the possibility.

Given the cloud of suspicion that hangs over most public institutions in the eyes of many Panamanians, the Electoral Tribunal ought to bear the burden of showing its honesty and impartiality, rather than leaving it up to others to prove negatives. It’s a difficult task, but that’s the whole point of the institution’s existence.

Moreover, when the matter of constitutional reform arises again, as it surely will, let the discussion not be naive. Along with other major governmental institutions and functions, the Electoral Tribunal and the processes it oversees are also flawed and also need to be reformed.

editorial

The f-word mustn’t be unmentionable

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