Santo Domingo.- The journalist and author Miguel Guerrero Wednesday defended the inclusion of a square in the electoral ballot to let voters express their discontent with the parties’ candidates for the Presidency, Congress or city officials. “It’s a right which cannot be denied to the country and for which we should fight with all the forces within the Constitution and the laws.”

He said it’s a victory of democracy, and could be established without the need to amend the law, via a simple resolution of the Central Electoral Board (JCE), and regretted that it’s president, Julio Cesar Castaños Guzmán, would discard the proposal, “without weighing that it’s contrary to democracy, when he received this week from a well-known non-partisan group of citizens.”

Guerrero said the JCE president’s prejudice sends a wrong signal to the other electoral judges. “Although it doesn’t appear to be the case, the Electoral Board has to defend the voters’ rights before anything else and cannot opposed a modality which bolsters the value of the vote and lets citizens exert their electoral right within the widest possible framework.”