Eugenio Chicas, President of the
Supreme Electoral Tribunal in El Salvador recently visited CIS to give us an
update on the TSE’s work for next year’s Presidential election. In 2006 El
Salvador began the process of moving to a system of residential voting – making
polling places much more accessible to all Salvadorans. And now Chicas and his staff are moving
rapidly to complete a system of residential voting everywhere in the country –
vastly expanding the polling sites. This
process would be difficult to complete anywhere – finding local sites,
notifying every voter of their new polling place, allowing for people to ask
for changes, training up sufficient numbers of election workers to staff so
many sites and making sure that everyone has proper documents for voting
here. But in El Salvador there are
additional challenges. Chicas told us about the struggle to locate voting sites
in areas controlled by gangs and the difficulty in securing those sites using
the national police or even the army, and making sure that people who live in
one gang territory don’t have to vote in another gang territory.
Despite the challenges of rapidly
completing all this work, Chicas said that the challenges posed by the
competing political parties and their candidates may be greater. This year there are already five declared Presidential
candidates and he anticipates another announcement soon. Each of those parties and candidates has the
right to have observers in every polling place – and each of them is very
interested in the work of the Tribunal – both the system here in El Salvador
and new systems being created to accommodate voting by Salvadorans in the
diaspora around the world. In 2014
Salvadoran citizens living outside the county will be able to vote by mail for
the first time if they have registered to vote and have a valid DUI. Chicas also made the note that there is a very
low number of people registered because ARENA blocked the emission of the DUI
outside the country for two years. They
did not start emitting DUI’s until December of 2012 and people were not able to
register to vote until the end of May*.
They have also had problems because the TSE does not have an adequate
budget to do publicity. By law, the candidates are not allowed to campaign until
90 days before the election but the parties are already running advertisements,
putting up billboards, hosting events, and making public statements. It promises to be an interesting and wild six
months leading up to the February 2nd election and the very likely
March 9th run-off.
 |
| The launch of voting outside the country May 27th 2013 |
At CIS, we need you. We need long term volunteers to help organize
the mission starting November 2nd or January 2nd. We also need international observers be a
part of the one week long mission January 27th- February 4th
and very likely run off mission March 3rd-March 11th. As an international observer or volunteer you
will help to insure that the elections here are fair, without fraud, and
democratic. So, check out the attached
information and submit your application.
More information on Election Observation check out our website or email us: electionmission@cis-elsalvador.org.
Information on volunteering and
how to apply (Spanish required and at least three month commitment)
Information on observing and how
to apply (No Spanish required, 9 day mission)
*For more information on how to register to vote go to the TSE's website
