Dominican Republic and Haiti: Country Studies

Dominican Republic and Haiti: Country Studies
JCE was the use of ad-hoc mediating and support commissions
or international observers or mediators.
As a consequence of the 1990 electoral crisis, an electoral
law was passed in 1992 that instituted a number of reforms.
This law provided the JCE with greater legal budgetary independence.
It also provided that henceforth Dominican citizens
would receive a single card that would serve both as an identity
card and an electoral card; prior to this law, the JCE shared
responsibility with the executive branch for the management
of the offices that provided the personal identification cards
that citizens had to present along with electoral cards distributed
by the JCE in order to vote. Naturally, this enhanced fears
by opposition parties that the emission of identity cards could
be manipulated to favor the government party. Like much of
the rest of the state, the JCE has also paid woefully low salaries,
a situation that has improved somewhat since 1996.
As a consequence of the 1992 law, building up to the 1994
elections the JCE leadership was expanded from three to five
judges—three chosen by the governing PRSC party and two by
opposition parties. The JCE also issued a new national and
electoral identity card and prepared a new electoral roll, which
ended up being flawed and at the center of significant fraud in
the elections carried out that year. Thus, the JCE remained an
institutionally weak, politicized institution.
For the 1996 elections, rather than choosingJCE judges with
partisan criteria paramount, independent figures were named,
who remained in place for the 1998 elections. Both these elections
were relatively trouble free. However, partisan criteria
again played a hand when JCE judges were chosen to oversee
the presidential election of the year 2000. In August 1998, the
PRD-dominated Senate named all five of the JCE judges without
consultation with the opposition parties. This action once
again made the composition of the JCE an issue of serious contention
among the country's major political parties. Finally,
after extensive negotiations, in June 1999 the Senate named
two additional JCE judges, one identified with the PLD and the
other with the PRSC.
The electoral law of 1997 (Law 275-97) mandated a number
of important changes in electoral procedures. In addition to
requiring public funding of political parties, the law instituted
a 25 percent quota for female candidates. The requirement
helped improve female representation in the Chamber of Deputies,
which went from 8.6 percent female representation in
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