Open Polls reported 5,821 anomalies in the 2022 municipal polls, marked by repression and electoral fraud, a process in which the electoral court assigned the 100 percent of the municipalities in Nicaragua the pro-government Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN).
Olga Valle, director of the independent body, presented the final observation report about the voting, which he considers a “thrust against democracy.” The study was presented in Costa Rica.
The agency managed to document—with the participation of a citizen network of 1,700 people—various irregularities. The country spent 31 million dollars in holding votes that did not meet democratic standards, according to what is deduced from the detailed study of Urnas Abiertas.
Among the anomalies found, they mentioned that the votes were called until there were 82 days left. This marks a difference with the previous processes, when it was done six months in advance.
Ortega’s regime set 20 days of “campaign”, but during all this period if something prevailed it was the absence of political competition, because a part of the opposition is imprisoned and another in exile.
There were 1,158 complaints from people who appear as candidates without them knowing, which constituted a multiple “identity theft”.
The FSLN also took advantage of directing the State: there were 1,341 complaints of taking advantage of government vehicles; 121 of the 153 mayoralties in the hands of the ruling party were involved in abuses like this, they specified.
“There were 205 acts of political violence between November 5 and 6. At least 50 arbitrary detentions occurred between November 1 and 12,” Valle pointed out.
The FSLN vote-getters
The director of Urnas Abiertas emphasized the political work of the so-called “vote mobilizers” of the FSLN. They made house-to-house visits to citizens, months before the voting, when they carried out a census to measure the degree of sympathy of the population for their party, but they did so in order to harass and coerce.
“They toured the streets, markets, in many municipalities it was reported that they mobilized people in a situation of alcoholism. They raised them to vote, they even made ambulances available to moderately convalescent patients so they could go to the polls, ”he added.
They were merciless with the state officials who were under surveillance by the FSLN commissioners and forced to send photographs to prove their participation in the flawed process.
“There was an arbitrary impediment to vote—crazy mouse—, the citizen approached the voting center, where he did his citizen verification, they told him that he was not registered there and there were people who sent him eight hours away from where he voted all his life. They were not allowed to vote,” Valle recalled.
Only 17.33% participated in the electoral farce
Despite the traps of the Ortega operators, Urnas Abiertas put numbers to Ortega’s failure. He calculated that the level of abstentionism in the 2022 municipal votes reached 82.67%, which reduced participation to 17.33%.
Valle affirmed that the FSLN annihilated the electoral process since last July, when they attacked five municipalities that were in the hands of the opposition party Citizens for Freedom with the support of the Police, whose supreme chief is precisely Ortega.
To calculate participation, the Open Polls technicians used the 2017 electoral roll and evaluated a sample of 366 voting centers. The result was a study with a confidence level of 95% and a margin of error of 5%.
The investigation was commented on by political analyst Julio Ricardo Hernández from the opposition UNAMOS, and former opposition deputy Eliseo Núñez.
Hernández regretted that the situation of repression in Nicaragua means that Nicaraguans only have two options: “not to vote, or to vote with their feet,” in reference to the thousands who have left the country to protect their integrity in other nations and thus find way a future that the dictatorship denies them.
Núñez ratified his thesis that Nicaragua is advancing towards a “single party” system and, in this sense, assured that the votes are carried out with the objective of keeping the political base active, which has been seen eroded in recent months, as explained by sociologists consulted by CONFIDENTIAL.
Mónica Baltodano, who fought Somoza in the Sandinista guerrilla before the triumph of the revolution, said that Ortega tries to give the appearance of remaining under the rules of “liberal democracy”, for which he needs the “comparsa parties” to project that image.
“There is talk of a single party when they are regimes that do not try to pretend to be a liberal democracy. Ortega needs the comparsas and that is why he is going to continue financing them. Until the last day, Somoza needed the stilt opposition. The FSLN is an apparatus designed to control the citizenry and used entirely for repression,” said Baltodano, who is also a municipalist.
