Costa Rican 2022 Election Update: Unfounded Fraud Claims Stir the Campaign
A radically interconnected world amounts to radically interconnected politics. The same way other countries —from the United States to Peru— have dealt recently with unfounded fraud claims during election processes, Costa Rica is going now through the same path. The Rodrigo Chaves (PSD) campaign, which will face José María Figueres (PLN) on a run-off election scheduled for April 3rd, has casted doubts about the potential for its electoral opponents to violate the electoral process.
The former journalist Pilar Cisneros, now elected as a deputy of the Legislative Assembly in the name of the Social Democratic Progress Party (PSD in Spanish), said this past weekend that the National Liberation Party (PLN) has the capacity to steal the election from Chaves. “This is not won, we have a powerful enemy in front, with a solid structure and capable of trickling down votes to take this election away from us,” she stated in a political rally. “So everyone’s duty is to work as hard as possible so that this April 3 we can win the elections and give the reins of this country to a person who knows how to do things.”
Cisneros’ claims provoked an outcry in different segments of the country, to the point that she had to admit that she made a mistake with her use of words. She now says she was referring to the internal electoral process of the PLN, citing news from 2017 when Figueres denounced a supposed “dribble of votes” after losing the primaries of his party. Cisneros declared in the midst of the controversy that she was talking about “internal partisan processes” which are supervised by the parties themselves and not by the Supreme Electoral Court (TSE), in charge of the presidential elections.
Costa Rica is a “full democracy”
The 2021 Global Democracy Index, developed by The Economist magazine, places Costa Rica as one of the only 21 countries in the world that have a “full democracy.” Costa Rica and Uruguay are the only two Latin American countries in the list. On a scale of 1 to 10, Costa Rican democracy scores 8.07, according to the index. The Economist qualifies the health of the democracies of the world based on their electoral processes and pluralism, the functioning of their governments, their political participation, their political culture and their civil liberties.
“Costa Rica has a long history of democratic stability, with a multiparty political system and regular rotations of power through credible elections,” affirms the Freedom House organization in its Freedom in the World 2021 Index, in which Costa Rica is declared as a “free” country with a punctuation of 91 out of 100. “The TSE carries out its functions impartially and the electoral framework is fair,” the organization said in the chapter about elections, in which Costa Rica gets all the possible points.
Costa Ricans have also been historically proud of their electoral processes, and the TSE is one of the few public institutions that has a high credibility among the public. Election observers from multiple countries and supranational bodies have never encountered fraud attempts in Costa Rican elections the first round of the 2022 election held on February 6, 2022, was no exception. This is all to say that there are no real reasons to question this or other national election processes in the country.
Read More: Costa Rican 2022 Election Update: This is the Newly Elected Congress
Reaction from the TSE
The TSE said this Monday that the electoral process in Costa Rica is “absolutely armored against electoral fraud,” in the words of its political management adviser, Gustavo Román. “Electoral fraud is impossible in Costa Rica. That the majority will of the citizens lean towards one candidacy and yet that the one that is declared the winner is another candidacy, that is impossible in Costa Rica due to a series of crossed controls, which are verifiable by the press, by the political parties and by the citizenry in general, and which prevent the popular will from being twisted,” he said.