New rules designed to exclude independent candiates

Electoral Tribunal sets onerous rules
to exclude independent candidates
by Eric Jackson

On September 4 the Electoral Tribunal issued Decree 16, which set forth new obstacles for independent candidates to qualify for spots on the May 2009 ballot.

By law, independent candidates get on the ballot by petition. However, the Electoral Tribunal doesn't allow candidates and their supporters to just go out and circulate petitions, as in virtually every democratic country.

Under the tribunal's Decree 16, supporters can only sign to put an independent candidate at a special table staffed by employees of the Electoral Tribunal. The independent campaigns, which will have between October 3 and February 3 to collect signatures, will be required to provide transportation, furniture, meals and police protection for the sign-up tables, and adequate toilet facilities. To start the petitioning process, candidates must file on or after October 3 a memorandum that the campaign is starting, and then must wait for the Electoral Tribunal to process and officially recognize it. Signature gathering is to take place on weekends, but not on holiday weekends.

A group of more than 70 independent candidates has formed the Independent Candidates Movement and denounced Decree 16. The group points out that because of the usual delays in formally accepting and certifying memoranda of candidacy and the many holidays in November, as a practical matter they won't have much opportunity to collect signatures until December, which also has several holidays (as does January). The expenses of the extra requirements, the group complains, are also excessive.

Under a previous decree that's being challenged in court, only those voters who are not members of any political party are allowed to sign an independent candidate's petition. (About one-half of Panama's voters belong to political parties, many of them as a condition for obtaining or keeping a government job.)

Among the independent candidates for public offices are to be counted at least two and by the end of the process likely several others, who have been endorsed by political parties. Panama City independent mayoral candidate Miguel Antonio Bernal and his running mate former Vice Minister of Public Works Grettel Villalaz have been given the Liberal Party's nomination. Small parties in danger of extinction have various options for winning the votes they need to retain their ballot status, one of which is to have some popular independents on their ticket for posts in the legislature or in the mayoral races in the country's larger municipalities. Thus, although Bernal is a member of no party and Villalaz has been a registered member of the Panameñista Party, including Bernal and Villalaz on the Liberal ticket probably guarantees the small party's chances of survival and probably gets these independent candidates around the obstacle course thrown up by the Electoral Tribunal, two of whose three members belong to the ruling Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD).

Apparently set to seek her old job back is the highest profile person elected to public office as an independent in the elections since the 1989 US invasion, former La Chorrera Mayor Brenda De Icaza. Not long into her term as mayor to which she was elected in 1999, De Icaza was removed by the Electoral Tribunal for firing an allegedly no-show city employee who had immunity from firing as a former candidate for public office. The tribunal's sentence included a ban on De Icaza that prevented her from running for office in 2004. As with every change of government there were hundreds of such complaints about political firings after the 1999 elections, but the Electoral Tribunal reserved its drastic penalties uniquely for the independent.

This time the new regulations will make it harder for independent mayoral candidates to get on the ballot, but meanwhile a 2004 constitutional change makes it theoretically possible for the first time since before the dictatorship for a person to run for the legislature as an independent. While the new regulations seek to leave that promise in the realm of theory, there are a number of people trying for seats in the legislature, including the leftist leader of one of the Social Security employees' unions, clinical psychologist Priscilla Vásquez.

In addition to the lawsuit previously filed by Miguel Antonio Bernal against the edict that only those voters who do not belong to political parties may sign independent candidates' petitions, the Independent Candidates Movement has indicated that another legal challenge will be filed to overturn the rules set down in the Electoral Tribunal's Decree 16.

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