Electoral Prosecutor checks phoney voters roll

The General Electoral Prosecutor’s Office (FGE) carried out an inspection on Friday, September 22, in the town of San Felipe, because many more voters voted in the area than the actual number of residents confirmed in the last population census.

Salomón Fuentes, Primary Care prosecutor of the Electoral Prosecutor’s Office, stressed that there is a difference between the Electoral Registry and the more than 3,200 people who supposedly reside in this district, with which the ex-officio prosecutor’s office began an investigation.

“We are beginning to consolidate the first interviews and verifications of people who supposedly reside in this district. He will go from house to house,” the prosecutor said.

In the words of Fuentes, the objective is to verify those people who allegedly committed an offense by changing residence to a place where they do not live.

“In total, we have 439 people more or less identified,” Fuentes said about the people who allegedly may have changed their residence fraudulently.

The investigation arose after last month La Prensa announced that 3,900 citizens were registered in the San Felipe Electoral Registry.

However, according to data from the XII National Population and Housing Censuses, the total number of residents of San Felipe is barely 1,258 inhabitants. From that amount, we still have to subtract minors and foreigners, who do not vote.

For example, according to the census, in the historic neighborhood, there are 957 adults. Of that total, 27%, or 258 people, are foreigners. In other words, in San Felipe, there are only 692 citizens eligible to vote in the elections and consequently, 5 times more voters appear in the Electoral Registry than reality reflects.

On September 6, in a note addressed to the Electoral Court, prosecutor Dilio Arcia asked the magistrates to prepare an electoral census in San Felipe. This partial census, according to the prosecutor, would also serve as a “starting point” to hold a larger one, at the national level, after May 5, 2024. Arcia recalled that the last time a national electoral census was carried out was in 1982.