Elections

Salvadoran's elected mayors and legislative representatives on Sunday. Our observation went over smoothly in 18 municipalities with 85 volunteers. I was posted in Ilobasco, the largest city in the department of Cabañas. The following are pictures of the voting center there. Please see the article that Maggie and I wrote here for more information regarding the flawed process: http://narcosphere.narconews.com/notebook/maggie-von-vogt/2009/01/el-salvador-legislative-and-municipal-elections-conducted-flaws

You can see how what happened compared to what we were predicting by reading this article that Maggie and I published just before the elections: http://upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/1660/74/

Here you can see people over-looking the voting center. Check out duder in the middle with binoculars. This has to be illegal, right? People did not have the privacy of their vote guaranteed.

This is the typical vote-receiving table. Normally there are supposed to be 5 members, but many tables were made up of 4. You can see the active observers (in red vests) monitoring the process. 

We got to the outdoor voting center at 6 am, just before members showed up to start the process.

This guy is part of the local electoral board. He is in charge of counting up all of the votes turned in by the tables and ensuring a clean transfer of information from the local to state levels. He continuously pulled me aside during the day to chat about whatever came to mind. He introduced me to the chief of police and invited me to watch the final count with the rest of the members of the board. When we took this picture, I was really unsure about how close I wanted to be to him because of all the shady practices I had seen him using all day. My final conclusion: he is not a very trustworthy character, but I have to cooperate with him in order to complete a thorough observation.