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tortillaconsal punto/dot com
Interview with President of Nicaragua's Supreme Electoral Council
After Nicaragua's municipal elections held on November 9th, the international media launched a barrage of attacks on the country's institutions, targeting in particular the country's electoral authority. In reports from "The Economist" and from journalists like John Carlin in "The Independent", blatant ignorance of Nicaragua's current affairs compounded those corporate media's customary prejudice against left-wing governments in Latin America. The reports were based on false accounts of the election process and its aftermath. For example both "The Economist" report and John Carlin's in "The Independent" claimed there were no international election observers. But there were. On November 25th Tortilla con Sal spoke to Roberto Rivas, President of Nicaragua's electoral authority - which in Nicaragua is a power independent of the legislature, the executive or the judiciary. In this interview he refutes the false accusations published and broadcast in the international corporate media.
TcS : Now the elections of November 9th are over and there has been much controversy with many criticisms, some specific, some more general. Can we talk about some of the specific criticisms? For example people like Julio López Campos or Monica Baltodano argue that the Consejo Supremo Electoral should not have issued preliminary results via percentages of votes cast, but rather the actual numbers of votes with the numbers of spoiled votes and also the number of abstentions. What do you think of that argument?
RR : It's a question of methodology. While it's true that the law talks about presenting the votes in absolute numbers, it also talks about three types of publication: preliminary provisional results with the transmission of tally sheets still to be resolved and without differentiating the voting stations where formal complaints have been made; provisional results with the formal complaints resolved and with the consolidated results from the departments; and the definitive results with the proclamation of elected officials and any formal complaints made to the Supreme Electoral Council resolved. We have given the preliminary provisional results in percentages because it is a very easy way for people in Nicaragua to understand and they are the ones who vote and who are interested in whom they have elected. If you tell people absolute numbers in a direct television transmission, the votes in numbers, it is difficult for them to identify who is leading the election, who is in second place and who is in third place. That has been just a matter of methodology, not that the numbers were not available.
In any case, my answer is quite concrete. In the publication of the provisional results in a medium of mass communication as prescribed by law, which was done in El Nuevo Diario (tr. a national daily newspaper), the absolute numbers appear just as they were presented. The spoiled votes will be presented in the Supreme Electoral Council's memorandum which has to be done after each election process.
TcS : Another question that has been raised after the elections is that the news media had many apparently contradictory reports as regards formal electoral complaints. Some reports gave the impression that some formal complaints had been made, for example in Leon. Then other reports appeared giving the impression that no formal complaints had been lodged. Can you comment on the issue of formal election complaints and whether or not any were lodged?
RR : Our system is very simple. In the voting stations there are four causes for formal complaints once the count in the voting station has been closed. I'll mention two of these causes for formal complaint. One is incorrect constitution of the voting station, another is through a change in the location of the junta and there are another two causes that have to do with the alteration of documentation and handing over results outside the time prescribed by law. That formal complaint is dealt with in the Departmental Electoral Council, in the case of León in the Departmental Electoral Council of León. In the case of Managua then in the Departmental Electoral Council of Managua. Faced with that resolution the political parties can then present an appeal for review to the Supreme Electoral Council which is the ultimate tribunal to which they can appeal. There is no other tribunal.
What tends to happen in Nicaragua as regards formal election complaints? There are very few. Despite the fact that they could be a way that political parties might use to cause confusion in an electoral process, they make little use of them. They do not use them as a means or a method to cause disorder in an election process. And in the case of León there are not enough formal complaints, whether they may be resolved for or against, to change the election results, And that is of the highest importance.
There are two main parameters. One is that the number of spoiled votes should never mean more than the difference between first and second place. And secondly, that the votes lost through any formal complaints should not mean a candidate wins or loses. But if those formal complaints comply with the law, are well founded and abide by the legal requirements, then it doesn't matter. And that may change a result, since the formal complaints are simply accepted such as they are and in the cases that come before us, we check them to see if they are in order and if so, give them our approval.
TcS : And what was the situation in Managua? Because Eduardo Montealegre who lost in Managua continues to question the election but, despite that, seems not to have presented a formal legal complaint.
RR : That is correct. There are no formal legal complaints. If you go back to November 9th. you will realise that all this is the result of something very well planned. On election day, watching television. I saw no disorder. I heard of allegations that there were problems with some party election officials. I know that some voting stations may have closed before the scheduled time. I spoke personally by telephone with Eduardo Montealegre, the ex-candidate for mayor of Managua and I set myself the task of sorting out each and every one of the problems he put to me. But these cases were no more than ten out of two thousand one hundred and seven voting stations. Which shows you - as well as being an almost non-existent percentage, those same cases were sorted out. So there was no disorder.
What there is, existing and in front of us is a thorough, very well mounted campaign, very well orchestrated and one that has its own logic. Montealegre the candidate for mayor of Managua has been candidate for the country's Presidency and came second. Logically, if he failed to get enough support from the Nicaraguan electorate in the municipality of Managua, if that did not work out for him, from a political point of view he is going to have enormous problems for a future presidential candidacy and they had to be duly prepared for a setback of that kind, or for an adverse situation, which is what transpired. Now, very well, with plenty of money, supported by external forces, supported by some countries, they have managed to mount a show wanting to make people believe there was electoral fraud in Nicaragua. Here the only thing there has been is respect for the popular will and the vote of the Nicaraguan people has allowed the electoral authority to declare elected the 146 authorities in the 146 municipalities.
TcS : What do you think of the incident in which election material was found in a rubbish dump in León? Was that genuine or was it a set up?
RR : I am presuming, since I still don't have the evidence, we suspect that all that was a set up, for various reasons. They appeared in the rubbish tip in the municipality of León, but they were voting papers from the municipality of Nagarote. This does not put at risk or in question the election in the municipality of Leon. And there were three specific municipalities. Nagarote in the department of León, Tipitapa in the department of Managua and Dolores in the department of Carazo. In none of these three municipalities was there the least doubt as to who won or who lost the election. The difference in the votes was such that voting material found in a waste dump was not going to change the direction of the election results. This makes me believe that some party election official at the moment of handing over election material what they did was dump it in some waste tip with the aim of giving an appearance that there was disorder so as to try and confuse people in Nicaragua that a fraud really was happening, with that argument.
I contrast this with what happened in 1996 where 50% or more of the voting station material in Managua appeared in Managua's rubbish dumps. And the electoral authority at that time was incapable of making a denunciation to the Public Prosecutor and to seek an investigation. In our case, we have asked the Public Prosecutor and the police to carry out an investigation and they are doing so and I guarantee that the people responsible who are found out will be subject to the full weight of the law.
TcS : Another issue that has been remarked on is a statement you made regarding a possible electronic intervention in the count system, Was that something significant?
RR : Not so much in the count system, I made a statement that we were worried about any abnormal occurrence on election day. And on election day, the transmission system was saturated, above all in Managua. And that made us think there may have been some external element trying to slow down the transmission system.
TcS : Is the transmission system a network?
RR : Yes, but it uses phone lines. Despite working as a network, it uses phone lines and that made us think that something may have been going on. We don't know exactly if it was in the transmission system or if it was at the very moment that the vote tallies were being put onto the scanners that something happened. Because the same thing happened in two other municipalities in the interior of the country that began the process of putting the tally sheets on the scanner and at the moment of transmission they did not reach us at the final destination. These tally sheets remained in some files. But this is a technical information problem rather than one of interference in the communication system.
In the case of Managua, what happened was that the transmission in Managua being delayed, bringing the physical tally paper was much quicker than finishing the transmission of the remainder of Managua's 2107 voting stations. So then we had a problem there of a legal nature since, once we receive the physical tally sheet, we can then not treat them as if they were preliminary provisional votes transmitted in the usual way. So that is the reason why, when we recorded the cotes we only recorded the votes from 1400 voting stations and we did not record the 2107 in the moment when those voting tally sheets were handed to us. Then we had to move from preliminary provisional results to provisional results which is what was published in the mass print media, like El Nuevo Diario.
TcS : Most of the reports of events after the elections reported a great deal of pressure on your fellow magistrates nominated by the PLC. Is it possible to comment on that aspect of the situation after the elections?
RR : It seems really anti-democratic to me, for a political party to pressurize a magistrate who agrees ideologically and politically with that party, for them to press that person not to make up a legal quorum or not to attend or to oblige that functionary not to comply with his duty or to fail in his constitutional duty to be present in a situation like the current one. And we have been lucky enough that the magistrate Rene Herrera, the magistrate José Marenco and the deputy magistrate Julio Osuna, who took the place of the proprietary magistrate Luis Benavidez, participated in the discussion of the declaration of elected officials. They gave their points of view and fulfilled their constitutional duty.
And the response to that was that the self-styled "democratic forces" proceeded to expel these magistrates from their party for having carried out their constitutional duty, which seems to me completely out of line.
TcS : Something that emerged in the declaration of the final results was mention that some magistrates were questioning some of the results. For example Emmet Lang questioned results in El Crucero and the PLC magistrates were questioning several results. What were their concerns about?
RR : This bring us back again to the results. The questions of magistrates Herrera, Marenco and Osuna were to do with the total votes obtained for some municipalities in the preliminary provisional results, in the transmission of data that we received from the network being in favour of the PLC over the FSLN and in the end they turned out completely the other way round in the definitive results. What happened?
It is that a number of formal complaints resolved in the intermediary tribunals before they reach the higher tribunal always changes the accumulated total votes, because if, for argument's sake, 10 voting stations are subject to a formal complaint and the reasons for the complaint are correct and these voting stations have an average of 200 voters each one would be talking about 2000 votes that would be subtracted from the political party subject to the complaint. And that changes the election results.
So the concerns they expressed was not based on whether or not there may have been fraud, but was based rather on the argument that the final data for votes in absolute numbers that we had was different to some degree from the preliminary provisional votes, or in other words, the data for votes prior to the resolution of any formal complaints. Still, they are within their rights after all. If they think theirs is a valid argument I put it to the vote, they get a majority or not and the matter turns out as the collegiate group decides that it should.
TcS : Something similar is that some international correspondents, for example John Carlin of the Independent have remarked that some results published in the newspapers were different to the results on the web site....
RR : The answer to that is the same. The difference in the absolute votes between the web site and their publication, as prescribed by law, in a mass circulation newspaper lies in the resolution of formal election complaints. We record the tally sheets without stating that the voting station is subject to some formal complaint. We record all the vote tally sheets but at that moment we do not know which way any formal complaints may end up being resolved.
TcS : A surprising number of international reports were still alleging after the elections that Daniel Ortega had rejected international election observation....
RR : That is not true. There were international observers here. There were representatives from the Latin America's electoral tribunals, for South America from the Quito Protocol group, for Central America and the Caribbean from the Tikal Protocol group and there were observers from the Mexican State Electoral Tribunal. Two groups of national observers were not involved. Simply because these observers had aligned with a political party. And proof of that is what I told CNN in an interview in response to the false claims of Sergio Ramirez. In the videos taken by international and local television cameras one can clearly see representatives of these two groups who had requested to be election observers at the Princess Hotel in an attempt by Señor Montealegre and the MRS to mount a demonstration here in the capital. There they were demonstrating in support of Eduardo Montealegre, all these individuals who had asked for observer status. So my question then is, were they going to be observers or representatives of the political parties?
TcS : Can one take seriously to any extent the accusation by the PLC that some of their election officials were prevented from being present at crucial moments in the voting stations or the count process?
RR : There were ten cases in Managua, cases one can count on the fingers of one's two hands, as I told you earlier, that were resolved personally. I sent people to sort them out. Of the ten cases, I sorted out at least seven. And that did not present a problem. However I can tell you that I have information, I don't have proof to hand, of someone who was in the campaign centre of the Let's Go With Eduardo Movement which is part of the PLC alliance, where this person saw that they were scanning credentials that the Supreme Electoral Council had given to accredited election officials.
And when this person asked what was going on, the justification they gave him was that the Council had not issued credentials and so they were doing them there in that way. In synthesis they were falsifying credentials for election representatives. And that could have caused disorder in a voting station if a citizen with a forged credential tried to enter and was detained by the election police in that voting station. But the issue of the election representatives was not general. One has to be clear about that. There were incidents. We don't deny that. I can tell you in my case so far as I recall, of ten well identified cases and of those more than seven were resolved in favour of the Constitutional Liberal Party.
TcS : Now the elections are over for the 146 municipalities that voted on November 9th, I think 7 municipalities still have to vote in the Northern Autonomous Atlantic Region. How are preparations going for those elections?
RR : We are already working on the organization of those elections in the Northern Autonomous Atlántic Region. we have set up the necessary structure for this and the truth is there is no reason for any problems.
TcS : When we spoke a couple of months ago, you mentioned that the Supreme Electoral Council had wanted to hold those elections in April so as to give more time for the area to recover from the effects of Hurricane Felix. Has it recovered adequately to be able to hold the elections in January?
RR : We have done a verification process - on November 9th when the rest of the country was in the election. In the Atlantic municipalities we did a verification process as a kind of electoral re-registration. It is not obligatory. What happens is that the citizen who does not turn up is left in the same electoral roll where they are in the permanent roll. But the citizen who turns up and asks for a change, whom we hope should be a citizen asking as a result of the hurricane, the change is simply registered and they are located in the place where they want to be located
Permit me to tell you that there were 30,000 changes. Very high, which has confirmed via this verification process our assumption that the Coast's electoral roll was very affected as a consequence of the hurricane. So that's why what we are doing now is to work out the definitive electoral roll for the Coast. We hope no major difficulties turn up. We can't see why there should be, if , maybe, the political classes, there being no candidate for mayor who wants to be a future President, maybe things will work out more normally, as has always happened with the other electoral processes we have had to conduct.
TcS : What was the verdict you received from the international observers of the November 9th elections?
RR : This observation done by specialists, technical people, by individuals who are electoral magistrates, individuals who conduct elections, people who have experience in electoral processes and, I might add, by individuals who have conducted the election processes that have elected most of the Presidents we have in Latin America today. These are very serious observation processes, very technical,. They are not aimed at favouring a particular political party. They are aimed at showing the electoral tribunal here some weakness they may see in the electoral process, how they ought to correct it and also to denounce if they note some situation showing indications that what is being done may involve a fraud.
So then these international observers have given us their remarks in relation to certain very, very technical issues: how to improve the opening of the voting stations, how to avoid queues of people by attending to three citizens at the same time, issues like that, how to manage the election representatives. Some remarks for example, one of them has said that he considers that national observers should have been permitted. Others have said the contrary, for the way in which these groups asking to be observers were seen to behave and they saw them as simply yet more members of a political party. But we have indeed received very positive feedback from them. Logically, not every thing is rosy. When I say positive, it is that it is very constructive. There are suggestions they make that could be negative about the way we are working, but they help us to improve for the future.
TcS: In the past you have mentioned that you and your colleagues are interested in seeing some changes in the electoral law as it stands now. Have these latest elections confirmed your view on that?
RR : Yes, definitely. Yes. No more than other elections. Every time an election process is over we, on reflection, again realise the need for electoral reform, but more in the technical sense than the political sense. For example, on the matter of accreditation of the election representatives, to force the political parties to present in plenty of time the proposal to authorize their electoral representatives. Or for example the fact that the production of identity cards has to be closed down 90 days prior to election day, that ought to disappear because it affects people who have lost their document and are unable to replace it.
And one ought to close the electoral roll ahead of time. In countries like Panama, the electoral roll closes a year or six months before. And no one protests saying it's a trick to close the electoral roll months in advance. Personally, I would eliminate the chapter in the electoral law referring to the communications media. And I would just leave it with a single article saying that all the communications media, without exception, are obliged to provide space, on the basis always of a contractual obligation on their part, to all the political parties regardless of their ideology, regardless of the candidates or who they represent.
And also there is a series of technical elements that I think should be considered - the reasons for annulling a voting station. One has to consider the system for giving results, because the law is very rigid on that - preliminary provisional results, provisional results and definitive results - and it generates the type of confusion you are telling me about and the speculation in the international reports. Like the fact there is a difference between the results published in the mass print media and the results appearing on the web site based on the records in the database and so ensure that the law state that the Supreme Electoral Council should not record voting stations subject to formal complaint in the count centre until there is a resolution for that voting station. So then that would no longer generate that difference between what is seen in the web site and their publication in print.
TcS : Do you want to add anything as a general comment on the experience of the last two weeks?
RR : Only that what has happened here is the people's expression, lodged in the voting places , that the law has been strictly respected, that whatever situation that may have arisen is not one provoked by or promoted by ourselves, but rather simply a situation that the law compels us to fulfill in a given way. And that we do indeed feel that there is a thorough campaign, something wholly planned, a comprehensive programme to create the impression that this process has not been a legitimate process but that it has been an illegitimate process, which is something that is totally false.