Panamocracy in action

The election is over! Waiting for the results, frankly, was not suspenseful -- the vote was lopsided enough that officials could announce that Ricardo Martinelli had defeated Balbina Herrera just a couple of hours after the polls closed. I guess I had the feeling that it was all over when some Martinelli officials came to our site in a helicopter two days before the election:

If you´ve got money to send a helicopter to a community with 120 people in it, you´re a force to be reckoned with. (In the final count he got about 60 percent of the popular total, and she had about 39).

Results aside, getting to see the Panamanian voting process was really interesting. It was about as smooth and transparent a process as one could hope -- and they got the results out quickly and accurately, which is impressive in a country where electronic communication is limited.

The polls opened in our site at 7 a.m., and panablog was the first media outlet on the scene. I asked the policeman stationed at the polling location if I could take a picture of the people in line waiting to vote. He said I needed to go behind a fence about 30 feet away. This was the first time panablog had had its access restricted to anything since I was told not to take another picture of the gigantic hot dog display at the Super Xtra grocery store in Arraijan during training. Which leads me to believe that Panama takes its democracy at least as seriously as it takes its hot dogs. Which is pretty seriously.

Anyway, here´s what the polling location looked like from a distance:

We could very easily have stood up to look over the fence and zoomed in for a much better picture, but I felt like the chainlink would add a dramatic effect.

(Our facetious sense of persecution aside, the voting station was well monitored and run, and you could tell election officials had things under control).

At 4 p.m. the polls closed, and the vote counting began. The count was conducted completely by hand, and was done in a room at the school where they have a solar-powered light so the proceedings are visible to everyone who wants to look on:

The counting process goes something like this: an official removes each ballot from the box, and holds it up so that it is plainly visible to the represenatatives that each party send to each polling location. He calls out each vote, and then an offical tally keeper marks the vote on a big board. Each of the party representatives (there were six at our site, each from a different party) keeps his or her own count as well. At the end of the night, every person in the room has to sign off on the final vote tally, so there are about eight different checks. Pretty solid li´l system they´ve got worked out here.