Wayne Law student helps to ensure fair election in El Salvador

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– PhotoS by Katy McFadden, courtesy of Wayne Law
 

PHOTO #1: Citizens in El Salvador stand in line, waiting to vote.

PHOTO #2: Wayne State University Law School student Nicholas Klaus (seated, center) poses with other official El Salvador election observers from the National Lawyers Guild and Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador.

PHOTO #3: Election workers and voters in El Salvador look over the lengthy ballot.


Nicholas Klaus, a third-year student at Wayne State University Law School, spent three days in El Salvador recently as one of seven official election observers with the National Lawyers Guild.

It was the second time Klaus, who lives in Ferndale, has traveled to El Salvador as a trained guild observer. He has found it an inspiring experience, despite not getting much chance to sleep during the trip.

Last-minute changes to the election process enacted by the Salvadoran Supreme Judicial Court complicated the mid-term election this year.

“Basically, they said that people had a right to vote for individual legislators as opposed to just straight party, which is what it had been,” Klaus said. “There were demanding changes to the ballot, which in some cases had 250 or more candidates on them. For election officials, it was an absolute nightmare in terms of trying to count the votes.”

And the vote counting is done by hand.

“Each municipality has one voting center,” Klaus explained. “Voters find their names on displays that indicate their table number. Each table is assigned 500 registered voters. The tables are staffed by five people, and each of those five people represents one of the parties. There’s no person at the table in charge. If there’s a discrepancy on a ballot, they must settle it among the five of them.”

In addition, the ballots and the voting are scrutinized by credentialed poll workers called “vigilantes,” who also represent the nation’s various political parties, as well as by independent groups including the National Lawyers Guild, which are invited by the Salvadoran Supreme Electoral Tribune to witness the election and ensure that the process is free and fair.

“The vigilantes don’t technically have any power to nullify a vote, but they’re another set of eyes on the process,” Klaus said. “And they’re allowed to communicate their will.”

The March 1 voting in Apopa, a town of about 150,000 people, was observed by Klaus, who found it to be a dramatic – if long and often contentious – process.

“Someone will say, ‘Wait! There’s a smudge on this ID,’ and all hell breaks loose,” Klaus said. “But throughout all that yelling and throughout the adversarial system, these friends and neighbors got through it together. Even with all the yelling, it always came down to the will of the voter.”

A bloody 12-year civil war in El Salvador ended in 1992 and was followed by a series of elections marred by fraud, according to the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador, a group with which the National Lawyers Guild works hand in hand.

“There is still a lot of mistrust of the electoral process amongst the population,” according to a March 4 news release by the committee. “However, the democratic institutions in El Salvador have made significant advances in recent years.”

Said Klaus: “It wasn’t that long ago that these people were killing each other.”

And passions still run high in the country, where wide schisms exist between the left and right political factions.

Klaus and the other guild observers determined that, as far as they could see, the mid-term election was indeed free and fair, although the actual vote took more than 30 hours – time the election workers worked straight through to ensure a good election.

“It was a really inspiring thing to see,” Klaus said. “The workers are essentially volunteers. It was intense.”

The counting of the ballots and determination of winners by the Supreme Electoral Tribunal took nearly a month – long after Klaus and the other observers had gone home – and the two leading parties’ tallies for seats in local municipal governments, the national Legislative Assembly and representatives to the regional Central American Parliament were extremely close.

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