Disdains plan B professionalism and experience, say INE employees

Fabiola Martinez

Newspaper La Jornada
Sunday February 5, 2023, p. 3

One of the points of discussion of the recent electoral reform, known as plan Bis the destination of the more than 17 thousand workers of the National Electoral Institute (INE), of which 2 thousand 571 are considered qualified personnelmembers of the National Electoral Professional Service (SPEN).

The promoters of the amendment assure that they will eliminate duplicities and with this to a maximum of 27 percent of the command personnel, for which reason they rule out affectations in the organization of the elections and citizen attention.

Meanwhile, the INE advisers maintain that the cut will wipe out 84.6 percent of the SPEN jobs.

Members of the decentralized structure of the INE, so called because it is divided into Local Boards (one in each state or entity) and District Boards (300 throughout the country) give the day his opinion regarding the reform, which provides for the abolition of 64 positions at the local level (32 of Vocal Secretary and 32 of Vocal of Training), as well as a general compaction of the district ones, by reducing them from five committees to one.

The interviewees are calm, but at the same time they prepare the defense of their employment in the Judiciary of the Federation.

The members have gone through the steps of the SPEN, the administrative machinery in charge of the entry, training, evaluation, rotation and promotions of the specialized personnel of the INE and of the local electoral public organizations (Ople).

in your own voice

Francisco Javier Morales, member secretary of the Local Board, 26 years of employment at the INE, formerly IFE:

I am specialized in the management of financial, material and human resources; I have to supervise that all the actions of the Board are carried out in accordance with the regulations. I am in charge of compliance with transparency obligations; I attend to judicial requirements, for example, for the location of people, and I supervise advertising in non-electronic media.

–One of the positions that would be eliminated is yours, he is asked.

-It is a situation that of course is not pleasant, but more than knowing that my job may be at risk, what strikes me is that what has been built over a long time, in the formation of democracy, is at risk . That’s what leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Around 100 people work on this Board, what I do I do not do alone. I don’t know if resources are really going to be saved by cutting jobs; I think the cost-benefit should be considered.

Rosa Isela Lazcano, member of the Electoral Organization in the Local Board, 23 years of service:

“I am specialized in the evaluation and planning part of the electoral organization. The lawyer (Morales) is specialized in the legal part, so (assuming those functions) would be a tremendous responsibility. In my area we plan where the polling stations will be located, we coordinate, in Mexico City, 24 district boards. We have not availability de facto With the schools, there we have a major problem to have access to all of them, so we visit private homes over and over again. (The layoffs) would be a great setback because at least we have been training for more than 20 years, refining procedures; It is not easy for there to be a loss of that magnitude, of people with a lot of experience.”

María Dolores Ruiz, executive member of the District Board, 23 years of seniority in the IFE-INE:

The reform wastes the experience, autonomy, and professionalism of those of us who make up the INE. My time at the IFE-INE has been through opposition contests, I have never had a recommendation or a veto. (The layoffs) would be, as I told you, the waste of a professional career service and, furthermore, it is something inhuman to think that the activities that five people coordinate are done by only one. I made a list of 43 general activities (in the District Board), so for a single person to do them is inhumane, it is impossible.

José Luis Vázquez Ramírez, district member of the Federal Register of Electors, 30 years of service at IFE-INE:

“This reform is very limiting, because the citizen service modules are not only for processing voting credentials, but also for receiving electoral packages, the installation of the Preliminary Electoral Results Program (PREP). Let’s imagine that the module is placed in the school that is back here; There is no way that we receive packages there and transfer them here or that we put the PREP there and then when we are asked for a certificate, we go to the school where the module is, so that it can be sung on the day of the calculations. In other words, they see it in a limited way. Second, we have to have a design of each module, for example, in relation to the bandwidth and store all the information, such as fingerprints, images and signatures.

The IFE was created in August of 1990, I joined in December of 1990, precisely in the generation of the credential to vote, which was done with a census technique; that is, house to house.

–Were you not interested in the voluntary retirement program last year?

–No, I still feel useful to work and I like this activity.

Mara Haydé Osorio Rangel, member of the Electoral Organization in the District Board, 13 years old:

An activity that I do, that maybe my colleagues are not so soaked, is the use of the electronic ticket. It is very technical, we have electronic ballots since 2008, when the Cinvestav and IFE practices were carried out. We have between three and five ballots in each district. In the case of the task of the vocal secretary (Eduardo Javier Silva) it is a highly legal and administrative job, the whole matter of hiring personnel in the electoral process or in citizen service modules is also very specialized, how he is in charge of the purchases, managing suppliers, security personnel, cleaning, to mention an example. And if the reform proposes that one person do all that is materially impossible, there are many specialized tasks.

Mónica Beatriz Pineda Ortega, district spokesperson for Electoral Training and Civic Education, 20 years of employment at the IFE-INE:

“I started as administrative staff and then I competed for office manager. I am married, I have daughters, and like many members of SPEN we have accepted membership changes and we have gone there with everything and our family. I was then in charge of the office of a vocal and then I competed for the vocal that I currently occupy. I was in Atlacomulco, then in Tejupilco and now in CDMX.

“What I do? In the non-electoral process, we follow up on all the programs that the central offices send to form citizenship, such as the Children and Youth Consultation and the Parliament, as well as projecting how we are going to install polling stations, especially in the sections that are more difficult.

“(With the reform) my area completely disappears. My perception is that it is a setback to the country’s democracy. I work at the INE out of conviction, I work with early childhood, so that children know that democratic values ​​exist, nothing more and nothing less.

The reform violates democracy, it is a complete setback to the 1996 reform, so with the disappearance of the district boards and the integration of a single position, all these principles of the elections are violated, such as certainty. It is something very serious.