Age Tops Ballot Today for Dominican Voters : Caribbean: Both leading candidates for the presidency are in their 80s, vying for the fifth time.

As Dominicans prepare to elect a president today, the paradox, like the candidates, is an old one--age.

Almost half of the population of 7.2 million is too young to vote, and more than half of the rest are under 40. Yet both leading candidates are over 80--and it shows.

President Joaquin Balaguer, 83, seems as mentally sharp as he was as a young lawyer, but he is physically frail, blind and vulnerable to a widely asked question: “When they hand him an official paper, how does he know what he’s signing?”

His lifelong opponent, Juan Bosch, has enjoyed an edge in pre-election polls, but he will be 81 next month, and already his occasional attention gaps and memory lapses have begun to embarrass supporters.

Although the two octogenarians reportedly share warm personal feelings toward one another, Balaguer has not hesitated to take unsubtle digs at Bosch’s apparent autumnal failings.

Last week, the Balaguer campaign broadcast a television commercial that showed an apparently befuddled Bosch take a 19-second pause to collect his thoughts while replying to a question at a meeting with the local American Chamber of Commerce. The awkward pause ended with a Balaguer announcement that “a man who thinks like that can’t govern the country.”

The incumbent’s campaign has also stressed its slogan “Balaguer, a Road Without Danger” to remind voters of Bosch’s Marxist past and his reputation for unpredictability.

Bosch may unwittingly have bolstered that image near the end of the election campaign when, while speaking to a group of Protestant leaders, he implied that he would loosen ties between the government and the dominant Roman Catholic Church by naming Protestant chaplains to prisons and hospitals.

The pledge reminded some voters of Bosch’s brief term as president in 1963, when he angered Catholics by proposing a constitutional ban on religious education in the schools.

Balaguer jumped immediately on Bosch’s remark and led off his final campaign speech Sunday with the cry: “We have no such disposition! The Dominican people believe in God!”

Political analysts said that by opening the religious issue, Bosch may have thrown away the 10-point lead that most polls have given him during the past year. After confidently predicting a Bosch victory over a Balaguer administration that has presided over 50% inflation and deteriorating public services, they now view the race as too close to call.

Today’s voting marks the fifth time the old warhorses have faced each other at the polls, with Balaguer winning the previous four contests.

Both of the candidates have had a lifetime preoccupation with governing the Dominican Republic.

Bosch, a self-educated high school dropout, poet, novelist and historian who is called “the Professor” because of his wide-ranging knowledge, opposed the 31-year dictatorship of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo and spent three decades in exile, much of it in Communist Cuba. After Trujillo’s assassination 29 years ago, Bosch won the country’s first democratic election in December, 1962, and served as president for seven months until ousted in a military coup.

When dissident officers triggered a civil war in 1965 to restore the constitution and put Bosch back in office, President Lyndon B. Johnson sent in 27,000 U.S. troops to protect the country from “becoming another Cuba.”

At that point, Balaguer was in exile, widely reviled for having served as the unelected figurehead president under the hated Trujillo. But when new elections ended the U.S. presence in 1966, Balaguer won and has missed only two presidential terms since.

As president he has patched together a failing economy by spending sums, estimated at more than $2 billion, on public building projects, including a towering lighthouse monument to Christopher Columbus just outside Santo Domingo. Balaguer makes no secret of his ambition to remain president long enough to dedicate the monument in 1992, the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ voyage to America, when Pope John Paul II and King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia of Spain will visit.

Criticized for running government money-printing presses overtime to erect monuments to himself, Balaguer is said to have replied, “The Pharaoh isn’t remembered for what he did to the price of flour.”

But his greatest weakness at the polls, analysts say, remains his inability to curb inflation and restore public services. Inflation has left the peso with 361% less purchasing power than when he was last sworn in four years ago, and about half of the work force is unemployed or underemployed.

Despite their frailties, neither man appeared the least burned out by the three-month election campaign, which ended Monday.

Although there are six other candidates, only two are expected to receive as much as 10% of the vote.

At a political rally for Pena Gomez in Santiago on Sunday, an onlooker was asked if he stood a chance of winning. “None,” was the reply. Then who will win? he was asked.

“Without a doubt, the old man.”