Electoral World Year 6 no. 18 September 2013

Editorial


Erasmo Pinilla C.


For this 18th edition, we are pleased to count in our main cover with the former president of the State Commission of Elections of Puerto Rico, Hector J. Conty Pérez, who, unfortunately has retired from the electoral activities, but in this edition presents to us a very powerful theme over the strengthening of the democracy. It has to do with the right to the vote of the citizens, especially of the persons that present some handicaps, and the guarantees in order to make effective this right. Read complete article



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The right to the domicile vote by mail for handicapped persons of Puerto Rico


Héctor J. Conty Pérez and Hamed G. Santaella Carlo


Our administration of the electoral process has been around the duty and commitment of the State Commission of Elections of Puerto Rico (CEE) of guaranteeing to every resident elector of Puerto Rico the equal access and participation to exert the fundamental right to the vote in a private and independent way in an environment of transparency and impartiality. As representative of the public interest, we work to watch over to guarantee all the electors the right and access to the electoral process, in fulfillment with what is established in the constitutions: the one of the United States of America and the one of Puerto, and federal laws over administration of elections applicable to Puerto Rico. Read complete article



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The importance of the refutations and claims to the preliminary electoral Roll (PEP) in the panamanian electoral process


Myrtha Varela de Durán

The article 142 of the Political Constitution confers to the Electoral Tribunal the duty of guaranteeing the freedom, honesty and purity of the popular suffrage, and besides, it is assigned, through the 143 precept as a privative attribution, and among others, “organizing, directing and auditing the registry of electors and to solve the controversies, claims and accusations that to this respect occur”. (The bold emphasis is ours).

Once it is defined the constitutional framework of the approached thematic, and it is established in an evident way that it is an attribution that only the Electoral Tribunal is authorized to carry out, in faithful fulfillment of the cited precept, the Electoral Tribunal, during the whole year, in a permanent way, permanently updates and depurates the Electoral Registry, integrated by all the Panamanian citizens that reach the majority of age, in other words the 18 years of age, and they obtain their document of personal identity, and they enter in that registry by declaring under the gravity of the oath their residence, designing their closest voting center to their residence expressed, known as residential or domicile vote. Read complete article



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Abstentionism or electoral participation of the youngsters: a matter that concerns everybody.
Rodolfo A. de Gracia Reynaldo


The words define the universe or the world to which we refer or to which our spokesperson refers to.

The Dictionary of the Academy defines abstentionism as the “attitude or consistent practice of not exerting the right to participate in certain decisions, especially in politics”. ¹

It is understood as a voluntary practice, a decision that comes out from the freedom in which the person that makes the decision feels himself in a certain moment.

The other concept that is necessary to define is: youth.

Of course, for the effects of the electoral participation, the criterion of determination of what is understood as youth is very complex because it depends, not only of a number range that they establish or the organisms, the institutions or the interested persons in studying a line or curve of observing behavior (in other words, a tendency) of that age group, but also of a series of bio-sociological, semantic, cultural, ethnographic factors, that at the same time allow to outline an hypothesis or thesis with respect to why a certain behavior takes place. Read complete article


The quality of the elections in Latin America


Flavia Freidenberg

I. The elections as a central process of the democracy

The elections are the heart of the representative democracy. Without free, fair and competitive elections it is very difficult that the citizens live in a democratic system (Schattschneider, 1964). Such essential idea has been the predominant paradigm in the relationship between elections and democracy during great part of the XX century, basically from the perspective of the elitist or pluralist democracy (Dahl, 1971). This idea had a great relevance in the way in which the elites and the citizens of Latin America understood the democracy, after the processes of political transition of the third wave at the end of the decade of 1970.

Although the elections are not the only mechanism of distribution of power to select public positions, since there are other mechanisms such as the consensus, the raffle, the seniority, the inheritance, the opposition-contest or the designation; the elections have become the neuralgic center of the democracy. Read complete article



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