Argentine elections: Half the nation's teen voters missing from voter rolls "by mistake" [View all]

[sandensea]

Argentina's National Electoral Commission (CNE) today announced a one-week extension in the deadline for verification of federal voter rolls until Wednesday, May 29.

The unusual step was taken after the CNE confirmed widespread reports of gaps in the voter rolls. Up to half the nation's voting-age teens were never uploaded to the official voter database by the National Registry of Persons "by mistake."

The right to vote was extended to Argentine 16 year-olds in 2012; over 1.1 million 16 and 17 year-olds were registered to vote by 2017 (80% of the total).

Recent polls show right-wing President Mauricio Macri losing to center-left Peronist candidate Alberto Fernández by 23% among younger voters.

Among all voters Fernández is currently leading by 11% despite having announced his candidacy just this Saturday. Former President Cristina Kirchner, who governed Argentina from 2007 to 2015 and who remains popular, is Fernández's running mate.

Narrowly elected in late 2015 on promises to jump-start sluggish growth with tax cuts and deregulation, Macri's policies have instead led to a massive debt crisis, an IMF bailout, and the deepest recession since the 2001-02 collapse.

Now you see it, now you don't

Today's incident underscores wider concerns over the integrity of Argentina's federal elections, scheduled for October 27.

University of Buenos Aires Professor Ariel Garbarz, a cybersecurity expert, warned that Macri's policy of having precinct summaries scanned and transmitted via e-mail to an electronic tabulation center, rather than having them visually verified, makes the process vulnerable to alteration and thereby fraud.

Mid-term elections in 2017 were marred by irregularities, with evidence surfacing of doctored precinct summary pdf files showing zeroed-out counts for Kirchner's Citizen's Unity in a number of cases.

The presiding electoral court judge at the time, Juan Manuel Culotta, was a high-school friend of Macri's. He struck down all complaints, and resigned shortly after the 2017 elections.

At: https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&tab=wT&sl=pt&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.politicargentina.com%2Fnotas%2F201905%2F29169-el-gobierno-impide-que-los-jovenes-de-16-anos-puedan-votar.html

An Argentine high-schooler votes in the last presidential election in 2015.

President Mauricio Macri, who opposed extending the right to vote to 16 year-olds, is down 23 points among young voters in the latest polls.

"Now there are problems in the voter rolls," according to student leader Ofelia Fernández, "because our voting obviously bothers them."