The Legislative, a Bs 473 million building that does not have an electronic voting system

The Legislative Assembly building It is built on 44,000 square meters, It has 26 floors and cost Bs 473.2 million all its construction, however, such an investment did not achieve the installation of an electronic voting system as happens in other legislative buildings in neighboring countries.

This Tuesday night, again there was no way to count the number of votes to save or censure the Minister of Public Works, Édgar Montaño, who had attended the session after almost a year of requesting postponements in the case of Boliviana de Aviación (BoA).

for more than an hour The vice president, David Choquehuanca, tried to make the voting as transparent as possible, and even invited the assembly members to go down to the main atrium and go up to have a reliable count.

It was the deputy evista, Gualberto Arispe, who highlighted the lack of resources and said that article 107 of the regulations for debates of the Assembly only allows four types of vote: by sign, nominally, electronically or by scrutiny. “Tell me where in this regulation it says that we must go down to the atrium,” launched the evista deputy.

The Assembly had to define the fate of minister Édgar Montaño and had two possibilities: the agenda pure and simple, which means that the minister comes out of the interpellation gracefully; and the motivated agendawhich means censorship and the consequent removal of authority.

According to the official lists, there were 116 deputies present and 28 senators, making a total of 144 legislators. The debate regulations indicate that the Assembly can only make these two decisions, the pure and simple agenda or the motivated agenda, there is no third option. However, the vice president found the ideal formula, there is no two-thirds for either of the two options and therefore the session is concluded without any determination.

For the pure and simple agenda, 45 parliamentarians votedTherefore, 99 voted against Édgar Montaño; but the vice-president said that for the motivated agenda there should be two-thirds and put that possibility to a vote. That was where the problems started.

“Let’s collaborate, all those who vote yes to censorship They can go down here to the center and from there they start going up and we can count”, suggested the second president of the country. At no time did any of the government or opposition parliamentarians suggest the use of electronic voting that this modern building should have.

Until now goesn about four interpellations that are carried out in this chamber and in none of them was there an electronic vote, all voting was manual, the assembly members raise their hands and the secretaries, and even the officials, manually count the hands raised.