Cuba: Voting Results in Plaza and the National Preliminary Results

by Arnold August
January 22, 2008

After attending the voting the entire day on January 20 from 7 A.M. to 6 P.M. in District # 12 of the Plaza de Revolucion Municipality, I also observed in the detail the counting of the votes in several of the 5 polling stations in this District. This count started at 6 P.M. There are always several citizens in the polling stations as witnesses, anyone who wants to attend, as well as foreigners such as myself who have the right to observe.

The first of the two sealed ballot boxes (one for National Assembly Deputies and the other for Provincial delegates) is opened by the electoral board representatives. The ballot box for Deputies is then emptied on a table and all can witness the fact that the box is empty with no ballots left. The ballots are then opened and complied into 4 groups:

1. Voto Unido (full slate votes)

2. Selective votes (for one or more candidates, but not all candidates)

3. Blank ballots

4. Spoiled ballots

Each one of the categories is counted. When tabulated, the selective votes are added to the full slate vote in order to have the total for each candidate.

I attended several of these counts last Sunday evening. Here is the result in one of the polling stations:

Of the total of those who had the right to vote and those who were added on as explained in yesterday’s article based on the unusual situation that they were temporarily in the Municipality, only ONE did not vote, making for a 99.5% voting rate. There is an interesting anecdote to this. The second to last person had voted by about 3:30 P.M. Thus there was this one person left. Normally, if everyone on the voters list will has voted by late afternoon and those who could not vote had indicated that they could not do so for reasons beyond their control, the polling station electoral board, with the approval of the district electoral board, has the right to initiate the vote count earlier and terminate their long day.

The electoral board members and the citizens acting as witnesses were waiting very patiently. I passed the time having a most informative conversation with a local resident about the national and international situation, someone who I have know for 10 years. At one point, out of curiosity and knowing that normally Cubans are very disciplined, in a case such as this, if they vote, they vote, if they do not, they do not do so I asked the electoral board: Who is this person who is keeping everyone waiting. They politely said that it was a young person, whose parents said that she was somewhere in the street. I then asked my friend: who is this person. He said that it is a young woman, who does not work or does not go to school. I then naively asked him, then what does she do? How does she earn her living? He responded: Guess!

If anyone ever tells you that are restrictions to voting in Cuba, here is but one example to defy this accusation. Here we have a group of responsible people waiting for two and a half hours for this dubious individual to vote (she never showed up). They waited even though they knew it may have been a potential spoiled of blank ballot, because according to the Cuba Constitution, everyone has the right to vote.

This 99.56% voting rate in this one polling station jives with the temporary national figures released today indicating that 96% of registered voters exercised their right.

There are several other voting tendencies to analyse, however, the results are not complete enough to do so, the most important being the full slate vote. Preliminary results released today show that 90% of valid votes were full slate votes. This represents an overwhelming endorsement of the call for voters to vote for all candidates.

However, I would like to deal with one result today that is the number of spoiled and blank ballots. Before I came to Cuba this month, I was reviewing all of the main academic books which deal in one way or another, or in part, with the Cuban electoral system. There are not very many at all. However, one caught my interest because it was based on very dubious figures regarding spoiled and blank ballots in what I believe was an obvious attempt to discredit the Cuban political system. It is a recent book written by Marifeli Stable-Perez, a professor at Florida International University and the vice president of Democratic Governance at Inter-American Dialogue in Washington, DC.

She basically stated in her book that official voting figures in Cuba are not reliable because they underestimate the spoiled and blank ballots. (Depositing blank and spoiled ballots is the preferred way for the dissidents linked to the US Interest Section in Washington to express their opposition to the revolution and provide credibility to the Bush program to force a transition in Cuba towards a return to US control over the island.)

Professor Stable-Perez alleges that 20 to 30 % of votes are spoiled or blank in previous elections. She does not provide any source for this! She is also quoted in yesterday’s Miami Herald, dealing with what has become the current past time of some Cuban-watchers and journalists, that is speculating about the future of Fidel Castro in the new legislature coming out of the January 20 elections. I stared to investigate the sources of funding for Professor Stable-Perez’s Democratic Governance at Inter-American Dialogue. This is not yet completed but the revealing results will be included in my forthcoming book.

Well, what did I observe on January 20th in the evening when the votes were counted? In this one polling station chosen by hazard, there were 5 blank votes and 6 spoiled votes, for a total of 11 ballots, or 5.37% of all the votes. If a ballot is doubtful, that is not clear as to whether it is valid or spoiled, a consultation takes place because it is frequent that ballots are spoiled by error.

Whenever votes are spoiled, at least two members of the local board have to make a common decision whether these ballots are really spoiled and sign the back of the ballot if there is agreement on this. In this case, one spoiled ballot seemed to be spoiled by error, the voter being too enthusiastic. He apparently forgot to put an X near the candidates and instead added on Raul Castro. Seeing that Raul Castro is not a candidate in that District the ballot was declared invalid. Write ins are no allowed as a valid vote.

At the District polling station responsible for collating the votes of all 5 polling stations, the total number of blank votes was 44 and the total spoiled was 30, for a total of 6.6% of the votes. This is slightly higher that the preliminary figures announces by the National Electoral Commission: 4.47% of black and spoiled ballots. It should be kept in mind that in the Ciudad de la Habana province, where I am doing my case study, blank and spoiled ballots are almost always higher than the national average.

For example, ten years ago, during the 1998 elections, this was the case: 4.15% were blank and 3.42% were spoiled, for a total of 7.57%, while the national average was 5.02%. The main point here today is that with these figures and based on my own personal observation’s one has plenty of ammunition to deal with any misinformation coming from dishonest academics and journalists against the Cuban electoral results. The results provided by the National Electoral Commission are correct, honest and transparent as is the entire electoral process in Cuba.