The president of the State Election Commission (CEE), Francisco Rosado Colomer, expected it to decide between Friday evening and Saturday whether it would grant the request to count the early vote in San Juan that the Citizen Victory Movement (MVC), and to which only the Puerto Rican Independence Party (PIP).
Although he did not express what his determination would be, Rosado Colomer echoed several arguments of the New Progressive Party (PNP) in the newspapers delivered yesterday.
He also said he would not necessarily expect the managers of the parties in the Administrative Board of Absence and Early Voting (JAVA) present the report they are preparing on the apparent imbalances that persist in the early voting units in the capital before issuing their decision. It has not been reported when the officials would hand over the document.
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“If it affects, yes (I’d wait to read the report). You read, evaluate and decide. I may need it, but I can’t tell you now. I’m in that phase of building based on the opinions of the parties, see what the controversy as such is and see how that kind of controversy is dealt with, ”said Rosado Colomer.
“It can’t be that in the middle of the game the rules change for me, in terms of how things were done and how they were done. Are you telling me I did it wrong? Because you did it, it wasn’t that someone else did. How that works together is part of the things I evaluate. If someone else did it and you weren’t there, then I can do an analysis, but it’s different when you’re there. If you make the cake and burn the cake, is it someone else’s fault? I need to see if that happens here, ”said the judge.
In his letter, the PNP election commissioner, Hector Joaquin Sanchez, assured that the JAVA audit was conducted in accordance with the law and regulations, rejecting that there were irregularities related to the lack of audit records or incidents in the cases, as stated by the MVC.
“There was a lot of concern that what happened in the primaries would not happen if the minutes were released (before the close of the election event). It was agreed (to keep them in separate suitcases), but after November 3 they were available, photocopied, a suitcase was found. All this happened, but for some reason there are people who don’t remember. No one complained at the time of the check. The research was done ”, emphasized Rosado Colomer.
“The PNP says our arguments are false because of lies. They say this has already been told and everyone agreed. The most surprising to me is that they say that the mismatch we are claiming is just a math error that can be solved and it is a mismatch between the minutes and the ballots. The big mismatch is between voters and ballots, and there’s no way to fix that. If it was the number of ballots by the minutes, something is wrong in the square. But it is the list with the number of voters, ”said Olvin Valentin, MVC election commissioner.
Valentin insisted that San Juan’s first ballot boxes be scrutinized with no notes or incidents, a situation that, he assures, has been corrected in later districts.
“Now they have started taking minutes, but it didn’t happen in district 1 to 5,” said the commissioner.
“Alarmingly, the MVC is claiming that in San Juan’s 5 wards, the number of ballots counted for Unit 77 (for early voting) is significantly higher than the number of voters who voted under any of the early voting modalities or absenteeism reported in Unit 77. The MVC has had access to reconciliations and the issue has been discussed repeatedly in the Commission, all of whom agreed that given the large number of voters asking to vote, the JAVAA manage the votes of approximately 220,000, instead of the roughly 15,000 who worked, which had an impact on their organization, ”was part of what Sánchez expressed in his argument to dismiss the count.
The election commissioner of the Popular Democratic Party (PPD), Gerardo “Toñito” Cruz, in his writing confirmed the proposals regarding the absence of tally sheets, stating that essentially a “copy paste” of the results of the evening of the event provided by the Office for Information Systems and Electronic Processing, as well as the problems in consolidating results from different cases of a district.
However, Cruz rejected that the census was the correct procedural mechanism to address the mismatches identified.
“The solution to the problem cannot be worse than the problem itself. We believe that conducting a census within nine days of the completion of the business days available to close this process would be a solution that would resolve the uncertainty as some of the public charges that are validated during the general investigation or the count, According to a constitutional mandate, they must take an oath in early January 2021 and no one can assure that we will comply with certifying such candidates prior to that swearing-in, ” he argued, underlining that a recount in San Juan is would set precedent for which candidate and parties demand the same in other municipalities.
According to Cruz, the CEE should set up balance boards so that, upon completion of the audit of the 110 counties, those in which the results and lists of advanced voters are examined “where the amount mismatch the chosen candidate’s margin of victory”.
“Only if there is no possibility for a reasonable square of a district can the ballots be counted at the end of all general machine control,” said the popular commissioner.
The Dignity Project, which opposed the recount, has not given these media a written argument.