Local Election

Last Sunday, I went to a municipal election for villas 21-24 in Buenos Aires (villas are basically urban slums), and the election was for their local representatives. I was designated was an “observer” along with the rest of my colleagues at ACIJ. Because of past military rule, rampant political corruption, and the instability of democracy here in Buenos Aires, civil society, as represented by the NGO that I work at – ACIJ, is trying their best to intervene and make sure all the rules are followed. My position as an observer was just to “observe,” taking notes on any irregularities, enforcing rules of democratic elections, and notifying the authorities if something suspicious occurs.

I planned on waking up at 6am because all ACIJ people were supposed to gather in front of our office building at 7:30am and take a special bus down to the villas. Being me, of course, I woke up 2 hours later at 8am. Thank goodness for lawlessness in Argentina (I lost count of how many red lights the taxi driver ran over) and for the traditional tardiness of Argentines (the bus ended leaving at 8:30 when I get there at 8:20ish), I was able to make to the elections. It was set up at a local elementary school and upon my entrance, I was immediately overwhelmed by the number of people that was surrounding me. These were not the voters, however; they were fiscales and presidents of each voting table. Because of multi-party system in Argentina and rampant election sabotaging, each table has a representative from each political party (they are the fiscales) and a non-partisan person to oversee the whole operation (they are called the presidents of the table). The fiscales’ role is basically to make the other parties don’t do something underhand. The presidents’ role is to be there to resolve any issues between the parties, handle the whole election and such. The reason an election needs all these people is that the voting system in Argentina is not electronic and everything has been entered by hand. It’s a rather cumbersome system. The ballots are basically photocopies of a piece of paper with a candidate’s name on it. For example, at my table, we had 100 ballots for candidate one, 100 ballots for candidate two, and so on. Each table is in charge of a section of the voting list, sorted out by the alphabet, and there were around 30 tables in this election. Each voter would enter the school, find out which table he/she’s suppose to vote at, go to that table, and show the president of the table his/her identification. If all the information he/she provides matches what’s on the official voting list, he/she is handed an envelope with an official stamp and signature of the president on it. Then he/she has to go into a voting booth, sealed off from outside view, and all the ballots from all the candidates will be in there. He/she will pick out the ballot of the person he/she wants to vote for, put it in the envelope, and put that in the ballot box of the designated table, which is right in front of the president. After all that, he/she is handed back the identification document and allowed to leave.

Whenever a voter comes in, all the fiscales go through their own copy of the voting list furiously, find the name, and make sure all the information matches. This is to prevent any unauthorized voter to wreck the election (the official voting list is assembled by the government, anyone not on that list cannot vote). They would also constantly check the voting booth together to make sure all the ballots are still there and such. It’s rather interesting to watch them taking this election thing very seriously and working hard to preserve their democracy.

One thing I found interesting when I was talking to the fiscales at my table was that they are mostly housekeepers and vendors – I expected them to be teachers and such, you know, to be so active in the political process. Another thing was that the election was almost like a fiesta, everybody drinking their mate (an Argentine herbal drink) and eating postres (cookies and whatnot). There were people going around to each table, handing out food to their own party fiscales. The whole lasted from 9AM to 5PM, when the polls closed.

Counting the ballots was the biggest pain in the rear end. Starting at 5PM, the presidents of each ballot destroyed all the remaining ballots in the voting booth and all the fiscales have to sign these forms. They first counted the number of envelopes in the ballot box, making sure it matched the number of voters recorded on the official voting list. The presidents then opened each envelope and counted each ballot by hand. There were some envelopes with two of the same ballots in it, so those counted as one vote. There were some envelopes with no ballot in it, so those counted as an empty vote (usually a high number of empty votes indicated a decrease in citizens’ confidence in their government). As the presidents were counting, the observer, the fiscales, and another official counting scrutinizer were there to watch them count, making sure the whole process is clean. We counted ballots until 6:30PM, and the whole thing was finally over.

I had much fun during the whole process. Everyone at my table was really nice, and I was fed lots of food by all the party members. Our table were assigned 500 voters out of the entire voting list and 87 people voted out of that 500. It was not a bad turnout and I had lots of downtime to chat and learn Spanish.

After that, my friends and I went to a local restaurant to watch the second half of the game between Argentina and Ecuador, a nice conclusion to an exhausting day.