Much of my day was spent in the municipality where I will be observing. For safety and privacy reasons, I will not reveal what city that is until after the election. However, it a city with a recent history of relatively calm and safe elections. One of the unique things about El Salvador is that there is a national office of the Human Rights Ombudsman, who is assisted by various regional human rights ombudspeople (PDDH in Spanish). These people generally assist people who feel that there rights are being violated, whether they are civil rights, voting-related, or even social rights such as owning land. The PDDH in this municipality was really welcoming and informative, and he explained that there will be dozens of observers from his office in the city alongside the six of us.
This weekend will be chaos. Tomorrow will consist mostly of visiting local elections officials. Sunday, however, will be a mess. Since voting begins at 7am, we will have to be at the voting center hours before to observe if there are any irregularities during the setup process. Voting ends at 5, but similarly, we can´t leave until all the ballots are counted and the results sent to the national elections central for the TSE (Supreme Election Tribunal).
Well, I´m off to bed now. I hope everyone from school in enjoying the last days of break.
PS There is absolutely no reason for the title of this post except that I figured out this keyboard has the ability to do the punctuation marks common in Spanish but not in English.
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