finally! Los Tiempos reports: The final results confirmed that for this judicial elections, the null and blank votes reached 60 percent, compared to 40 percent of the valid votes. [so those pre-selected candidates by current government will take office. Is that going to be legal? yes, legitimate? no]
The President of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE), Wilfredo Ovando, presented yesterday the final and official national count of the elections held on October 16th for Judicial authorities and the Constitutional Court. He also announced that on November 17th, credentials to the winning candidates will be handed in; thus ruling out any possible revision of the results.
Ovando said that only the valid votes count, “a will that must be enforced.”
The leader of National Unity (UN) Samuel Doria Medina, keeps insisting on the annulment of the election, he said we can not ignore the majority of the invalid votes; if only valid votes were the base for appointing the candidates, they are a minority; so the sworn in of the “winners” will not have “no legitimacy nor legality.”
“The Constitution in Article 182, paragraph 5, states that to be elected to the judiciary, a person has to obtain the simple majority of votes and in all cases the valid votes had no such majority,”said the political leader, the ruling is “clear and unequivocal,” and that the majority of the population rejected the candidates and the electoral process.
Moreover, Doria Medina cautioned that the official results presented today (11/10/11) confirm the errors shown above on the total votes and the differences in the totals of the casted votes (valid, invalid and blank), for the four columns, when voters used a single ballot.
The damage is done; countries like France had implemented elections for their Judiciary System and after an evaluation abandoned this type of election. Here, problems will grow as legitimacy will be used to criticize any ruling; in Bolivia we lost money, time and just for the sake of “change” we are forced to do things that do not work elsewhere. Why reinvent the wheel, just for the sake of “change”?
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