Election in El Salvador

In answer to Salvadoran Ambassador Miguel Salverria’s letter of April 22, I would like to say the following:

My wife and I were in El Salvador on March 10 and observed the elections to which he refers. I spent most of the day in San Salvador, at four different sites. These are my observations and concerns:

The set-up of the voting area did not adequately protect the voters’ right to cast a secret ballot. I sidled up and was able to see how people marked their ballots. Instead of having an enclosed voting booth as we do in the U.S., they just have a 10-inch high partition around the top of the voting desk that anyone could easily see over. The polling places are in the most populated areas, which meant they were inaccessible for those who lived in the outskirts of town. People in one community I visited told me that they had to walk three hours to get to their voting site.

Voter registration cards were supposed to be issued before the elections, but the backlog became such a scandal that the National Assembly passed a law to make proof of registration adequate for those who wanted to vote but had not yet received their cards. But the law was not passed until the day before the elections! How many people did not know the law had been changed and did not vote?

I saw several instances where voters showed up at the polls but found their names missing from the rolls. They were not permitted to vote. Why? No one seemed to know. I asked who was monitoring the computer-programmed voting list. No one knew. The best that I could ascertain was that the ruling Arena party controls the computer and its programming. The other political parties were present during the voting but there was no apparent control against fraud in tabulation of votes by computer.

I visited an opposition party headquarters the day before the election. There was a drive-by shooting two days before and one candidate had been seriously wounded. There were armed men everywhere: soldiers and police with automatic weapons. It would be naive to believe there was no intimidation of voters resulting from this repressive atmosphere.

What I saw makes me doubt the easy assurances of the ambassador about the fairness and openness of the elections.

FRED BROOKS

ROCHELLE McADAM

Santa Monica