The President of the Board of Directors of Servel, Andrés Tagle, has emphasized that the complaints that parliamentarians and citizens have made on social networks this week (including disqualifications) were not made within the time limits and in the manner indicated by law.
“In the first place, everything is untimely. The political parties had the electoral register available 90 days before the election, and they had every right to have presented their claims before the electoral tribunals regarding the things they considered incorrect,” said the President of Servel in T13 Night. “So they make this complaint now, at the wrong time, through social networks and with disqualifications. They did not do their job at the time,” he assured.
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The Electoral Service points out that “these accusations and other false news that seek to delegitimize Servel are not new and have been experienced throughout the electoral cycle.” And it is that, as they said, the greatest deployment has occurred in recent weeks and occurs in the context of a global trend to “damage the image of electoral bodies prior to elections or plebiscites.” This occurs, according to the organization, “due to the search of certain political sectors to facilitate the questioning of the results.”
“There has been false news about our computer system. Some completely false analyzes and Excel spreadsheets have been fabricated. We were also accused of false sponsorships, when we ourselves discovered the Ancalao case and publicly denounced it,” added Tagle. And he added: “We have even been linked to the plane that passed through Chile and that brought Venezuelan people who were going to manage the system. This has been a set of false news discrediting us.”
“The main reason is because they are Chileans who have died abroad, and they have had deaths that have not been processed in Chile. So neither the Civil Registry nor we can find out about these deaths to remove them from the Electoral Registry. There is a set important group of people,” Tagle said.
In addition, it must be considered that the Electoral Registry was closed for this Plebiscite on May 1, 125 days before it. “All subsequent changes are not included in the register,” Tagle explained.
“We estimate that some 300 people a day should die in Chile. If you calculate between May 1 and September 4, we believe that there will be some 30,000 deceased people, who will appear in the register as qualified to vote, but obviously they are not going to be,” he said.
Added to the previous situation is that of the disappeared detainees, which is different, since the register indicates that they are absent persons “due to forced disappearance” by way of testimony. Andrés Tagle affirmed that “there are 780 people whose relatives have not carried out the presumed death, and it is a decision that we respect. The rest of the relatives of disappeared detainees, who are well over 780, did carry out the presumed death.”
Andrés Tagle added: “Our voting procedure has an obligatory identity control by the members of the polling station, where an identity card or passport is required, a control that can be verified by the proxies. In case of doubt, the polling station can resort to the expert in identification of the Civil Registry present in each polling place to make an identification by means of a fingerprint”.
Given that this procedure prevents the impersonation of possibly deceased voters, it is the reason that the Electoral Service has been prudent in not removing voters from the rolls while it does not have formal certainty of their deaths, to avoid making the mistake of removing from the rolls and prevent the right to vote of living voters, which would be much more serious.
The President of the Board of Directors of the Electoral Service concluded by saying that disinformation campaigns are unfortunate, “because our process, democracy and guarantees are discredited. Servel always comes out stronger on election day because none of the incidents or apprehensions happen.”
