08/06/2021 14:00
Clarín.com
Opinion
Updated 08/06/2021 17:07
Our country was born with the impulse of the democratic ideal and it had it from its first steps and struggles for independence.
These days will be the 200th anniversary of an inadvertent date: on August 11, 1821, Governor Martín Rodríguez and his minister Bernardino Rivadavia signed the promulgation of the first Universal Suffrage Law;
as Daniel Larriqueta recalled in these pages days ago, “a law of free men, of any color, race, religion, fortune, education, profession.
A law with open arms, which will be the moral axis of the construction of the Argentine Nation, this that we are ”.
Decades of civil war passed and then others of restricted voting until arriving at the Saenz Peña Law of 1912. It took half a century of disputed legitimacies, military coups, political instability, violated rights and de facto regimes to achieve the democratic continuity that we enjoy and not we get tired of defending, against winds and tides, in these last 38 years.
We are now approaching the 20th election for legislative renewal, with an electoral system that, with all its defects and problems, has shown its consistency and permanence, managing to successfully process the changes in political representation and the numerous crises that found resolution without altering respect for the popular mandate and the regularity of elections.
It is our mast of the ship in the midst of the storms, to which Ulysses clung, back to Ithaca, in The Odyssey, to avoid the influence of the siren's songs.
This pandemic has been, in some way, our Trojan War and the siren songs are reflected in the factors that affect or degrade the holding of free and competitive elections.
It occurs for example when the electoral system is manipulated to control its results (cases of Venezuela or Nicaragua) or when doubts are sown from the rulers themselves about the reliability of the elections when they fear losing (cases of Trump in the United States and , now, Bolsonaro in Brazil).
The largest reinsurance of the electoral process, in the Argentine case, the National Electoral Chamber (CNE), has been working on the exceptional conditions in which we will vote for the pandemic.
For now, there is already a health protocol, approved by the Justice and the Government, with specific provisions to guarantee citizen participation and electoral control in the September PASO and the November elections.
In the same sense, summoned by the Ser Fiscal Network, more than 12 political forces signed a presentation before the CNE for better and greater controls on computer security in the loading of data in national elections.
This action and the implementation of said measures will tend to give greater protection and security to the provisional count, minimizing possible leaks in security in addition to providing greater transparency in electoral matters.
In Cavafis's poem, Ithaca reminds us that the journey is as important as the goal, that it may seem unattainable.
On the importance of valuing the path, any path, and not only longing for the goal, regretting that it is not achieved, losing ourselves in longings, tribulations or dreams: a metaphor that can be extended to many processes of our life, also to democracy, such as always unfinished construction of a desired order, of a better society.