In a letter to the president of the State Election Commission (EEC), Francisco Rosado Colomer, the electoral commissioner of the Citizen Victory Movement (MVC), Olvin Valentin, formally requested a count of unit 77 of the five seals of the municipality of San Juan.
Valentin alluded in the letter to the whole range of irregularities that have plagued the scrutiny of these units, in which the absent and early vote is counted by mail, at home and confined.
In essence, Valentín maintains that due to the constant lack of documents, electronic receipts and other procedural guarantees to attend to the briefcases of unit 77, it is included with the provisions of the Electoral Code and the internal EEC manuals governing the general scrutiny process.
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“It is not possible to carry out a legally valid general scrutiny without having basic information about the night of the event with which to compare the contents of a briefcase. This situation has occurred in all the precincts in which so far a ‘scrutiny’ has been carried out for Unit 77 “, argued the electoral commissioner.
In addition to the impossibility of establishing correspondence between the ballots that will be awarded for the night of the event and the general scrutiny, Valentí pointed out that “none” of the briefcases of unit 77 have a list of voters which votes are contents.
As he has insistently denounced since last week, Valentí has also spoken at the gaps between the numbers of voters and ballots found in unit 77.
“In one case, corresponding to Precinct 1, Unit 77, School 3, hundreds more votes were reported per candidacy for the candidate for Mayor by the PNP (New Progressive Party) for the Municipality of San Juan that the total votes per candidacy in the full briefcase and that clearly will not go through review of acts. An attempt was made to identify the checked briefcase and check it, but it was never possible to locate it. On two occasions, the wrong briefcases were brought to the table. The Incident Records delivered to the table contained information from different tables through which the briefcase had passed, but it was difficult to identify the seal of the briefcase, its name and origin. To this day, it has not yet been possible to identify from which briefcase the numbers of that savannah (record) came out “, Valentín will express in the letter to Rosado Colomer.
Last week, Valentí detailed that MVC officials had identified 6,765 excess ballots compared to the number of early voters, information that has been validated by the electoral commissioners of the Puerto Rican Independentista Party and the Democratic People’s Party, although rejected by the PNP.
According to the commissioner, a briefcase that was counted on the night of the event with 13 legislative ballots from precinct 3 could not be located later in the general scrutiny, so its results would not have been awarded. Valentí also alleged that, in the face of the inconsistencies observed in seal 1, on December 9, an appeal was initiated using four electronic ballot machines per table, requiring officials to supervise each other.
The apparent mistakes made, in turn, have complicated the consolidation of acts of the different schools of unit 77.
“All this has caused that, in innumerable cases, the consolidations have to be supplemented again and again, according to appear new performances, as well as that, in some cases, does not exist certainly around if some performances have been counted more than ‘once or if, on the contrary, they have been totally excluded from consolidation. These elements have been especially observed by officials in the Precincts 1, 2, 3 and 4 ”, indicated Valentín in the letter, that is in agenda to discuss this afternoon in the plenary session of the CEE.
“I believe that (the letter) lays the groundwork for him to investigate the results of unit 77. It establishes a series of irregularities in the scrutiny process, how it was carried out, the consolidations of minutes and the lack of materials and minutes that they must be necessary to carry out the process. But the most revealing and worrying thing is the gap between voters and ballots. The (Electoral) Code is very clear and states that if it does not match in numbers, this calls for recognition by way of exception. I honestly don’t know what explanation there could be “, Valentín told the press.
The commissioner added that this afternoon, at the EEC meeting, he insisted that the report on the squads drawn up by the party managers in the Absent and Early Voting Administrative Board (JAVA) it must be completed and delivered quickly.
According to Valentin, the report has not yet concluded the analysis of seal 1, where preliminary calculations point to an excess of 3,130 ballots.
“Some of the managers, particularly the PNP, justify the number of ballots on the basis of what is in the minutes of incidents, which gives a few ballots for debate of the total number of voters and there would not be a discrepancy. Another scenario includes the incident acts with the night of the event, which raises the numbers a bit but stays in a safe area. Then there is the scenario in which the scrutinized ballots are taken into account, which for me is the most real, because it contemplates the ballots that were passed by machine and that are the ones that the country sees in the page of the scrutiny ”, argued Valentin, who did not rule out that the squads in JAVA unit 77 will be replicated in other precincts outside the capital.
Any challenge to the results, Valentin said, would have to come from the defeated candidates, who are the basis of the Electoral Code and who have the legitimacy to challenge them judicially.