Argentina’s Deputy Chamber approved the use of a single-paper ballot for national elections on Tuesday. The move means that starting with next year’s legislative elections, instead of placing individual ballots for each party Argentines will cast just one with all their favored candidates.
The bill passed with 143 votes in favor and 87 against. 21 deputies were absent from the session, one did not vote and five others abstained from voting. The ruling coalition La Libertad Avanza (LLA) spearheaded the bill, which was supported by the PRO party and other members of the “moderate opposition” like the UCR party and the Innovación Federal bloc. All but one Unión por la Patria Peronist bloc’s deputies voted against it, and the left-wing Frente de Izquierda bloc abstained from voting.
During the session, LLA deputy Nicolás Mayoraz said that the new ballot system is “an anti-caste bill” and that it will end “with a corrupt practice of people stealing ballots from the polling station.” UxP deputy Carlos Castagneto countered by accusing the ruling coalition of “wanting to destroy political parties.” He also highlighted that Argentina’s 40-year-old electoral system has never received credible fraud complaints and warned that voters would have to be taught to use the new electoral system.
Until now, in Argentine elections, each coalition had to print their paper ballots with the name of each candidate. The new law will replace those with a single paper ballot printed by the government that includes all contending coalitions, showing only the names and pictures of the presidential and vice presidential candidates plus five legislative hopefuls. Voters will have to mark their chosen candidates for each category with a pen or pencil. Variants of this system are already used in the Santa Fe, Mendoza and Córdoba provinces.
Facundo Cruz, a political scientist and a member of the Research Center for Democratic Quality (CICAD, by its Spanish acronym) said that provincial coalitions, which were key to passing the bill, could benefit from the new system. He said that, as it was passed, the single-ballot system “unties” the national and the provincial political negotiations.
Cruz told the Herald that the change will have a short-term and a long-term effect based on observations in Santa Fe and Córdoba. The first one will be that more people will unwillingly cast blank or null votes as some voters will not understand the system. Second, he expects that national and provincial electoral behaviors will become even more distinct from each other.
Regarding the alleged increased transparency of the new system, Cruz was not convinced. “There is no conclusive study that has confirmed that ballot theft had an impact on electoral results, or that ballot theft is so massive that it generates an adulteration of the results,” he said.
Another argument given by the defenders of the new system is that party observers — called fiscales — key to national elections until now, will no longer be necessary. Cruz said that they will “continue to be an important actor of the electoral process” as political parties are “co-responsible for the organization of the elections according to the Argentine law.”
“The single paper ballot does not make the voting process more transparent. It only modifies the format in which citizens express themselves,” he said.