Regional Elections October 2024

The process is explained here:

Voting takes place over 2 days, Saturday 26 and Sunday 27.

The reason given for allocating two days is due to the large number of candidates in each of four categories, each category requiring a separate ballot paper. Its anticipated that the voting process will be abnormally slow for that reason, so the entire weekend has been set aside to ensure that all the electorate can participate.


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Presidential pre-candidate Evelyn Mattei, interviewed in todays’s Diario El Dia:

How do you see these elections going?

“I think we are will see a high percentage of null or blank votes, because there are many people who no longer believe anything in anyone, in any person, in any party, in any institution, and what we are trying to do is demonstrate that these candidates are serious people and in general they are going to do well.”

Its not clear which candidates she is referring to…presumably not all of them?

I think what she says about spoiled votes will turn out to be true. Many people are already irritated by the suspension of normal weekend activities over two days in order to compulsorily participate in a system they no longer have any faith in.

Our mayor has been arraigned on fraud and other charges, and he’s still running for reelection!

https://www.meganoticias.cl/nacional/455155-alcalde-araya-reeleccion-buin-fraude-al-fisco-07-08-2024.html

Las pruebas que pesan en contra del militante UDI –[según da cuenta el expediente judicial de su causa son contundentes: funcionarios fantasmas, depósitos de funcionarios municipales y transacciones que –a los ojos de la Fiscalía– son sospechosas y podrían constituir grdaves delitos de corrupción.

What a joke. If there were no fine for not voting, I’d sit this one out.

I intend to mark each paper with a big $ sign.

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Understand the cynicism.

But as a USA person who last voted in the US in 2000 for a third party candidate, I am used to voting my conscience no matter even if is worth nothing because of the dominant party where I reside whether lefty near one party state Maryland, one party state California or lefty commie V Region and San Antonio.

I will be voting straight Chile Republican Party on principle vs. spoiling my ballot. The election for the second congressional convention representatives shocked the system and established the Republicans as a new real force to be reckoned with.

Where is Tom Brad these days? Wasn’t he involved in the early formation of that party and perhaps still involved?

Well, it’s been a while since I moseyed through these here parts, but after perusing SERVEL’s site, I have not come up with any info with regards to the Chilean electoral system.

This is my first time voting for legislature and executive reps in Chile. I’ve only voted for Rechazo on the first plebiscite and for a representative in the election for the constituent council for the second plebiscite. I was abroad for the second plebiscite vote.

I’ve looked through sample ballots, and I’m trying to understand how seat allocation works for the legislative bodies (i.e. consejeros and consejales). Gobernadores and alcaldes seem straightforward.

I’m from a purely proportionally representative parliamentary system, so voting is easy. You just pick your party, votes are tallied and the seats are allocated proportionally by party support in the relevant chamber. We don’t vote for candidates. The parties choose them internally. Heads of executive, ie, mayors, provincial premiers and the president are elected by the legislatures.

I’m struggling to understand how seats are allocated when there are multiple candidates for one party. Let’s take the following ballot example from 2021:

UDI has five candidates listed 323 - 327. But you can only pick one.

OK, which one should you pick? Let’s say you’re diligent and you go and research all these people’s backgrounds etc, and you decide that 323 best represents your interests. Based on what, who the hell knows? I still don’t understand how the system translates your support for that one candidate into a seat.

Let’s consider, for simplicity’s sake, that there are 5 council seats. Let’s also say that there are 10 voters in this comuna. 6 of them vote for Candidate 323, while the other 4 voters give one vote each to Candidates 328, 329, 330 and 331. Candidates 324 to 327 get 0. So, what happens now? UDI gets one seat and the SocDems get four? It can’t be that stupid. First Past the Post-based constituency voting is dumb, but this is retardation on another level. What am I missing?

Any Chileans, Yanks, Canucks or Poms that can explain, I’d appreciate it. Thanks.

EDIT: Wait a minute. I think I just figured it out.

Those party labels mean nothing other than affiliation, I guess. By that I mean, the parties don’t put candidates up. The candidates put themselves up under the banner of the party they are registered with. So, this comuna will be represented by ONE individual listed on that whole ballot? Have I got that right?

Actually, the ballot you are looking at is for the municipal council. There are no congressional elections on these dates. I just looked it up and municipal councils have between six and ten members, depending on the population of the municipality.

Those groupings are lists and from what I found if a candidate is part of a list that does well overall, they may get a spot even if they received fewer votes. https://www.servel.cl/2021/05/27/sistema-dhondt/

The other positions being voted for are mayor, regional governor, and regional council member.

Unfortunately, it’s really hard to research the municipal council candidates. There are so many and not a lot of info. I’m probably voting for the only guy that took the effort to leave a flyer at the house!

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I was looking at the options for mayor here, and they’re all from small, weird parties/lists except for the current, corrupt, mayor, who I won’t be voting for. There’s not a lot about their proposals. I couldn’t find anything about one candidate. The one page I found timed out I feel like I’ll just have to pick one at random.

-Carlos Enrique Caro Briso (Partido Humanista por Izquierda Ecologista Popular)
-Miguel Araya Lobos (UDI por Chile Vamos)
-Rodrigo Pérez Vidal (Partido Alianza Verde Popular por Pacto Ecologistas, Animalistas e Independientes)
-Marcelo Álvarez Álvarez (FRVS por Contigo Chile Mejor)

Voted at around 10am. There weren’t too many people at that time, which was just as well as the process, as anticipated is slow.
It didn’t take me long to actually vote, as I just marked each sheet as I have indicated previously, but folding up that massive cedula consejales sheet correctly took me a couple of minutes.

Lo sé. That’s why I went looking for that ballot. :stuck_out_tongue: That said, I was assuming that the electoral systems would be the same at all levels of government; national, regional and municipal.

Yes, that’s about right. I just checked Ñuñoa, and it has twelve.

This was a good find. Thanks for this.

La Ley 21.200, que modifica la Constitución Política de Chile, indica que para la elección de los Convencionales Constituyentes serán aplicables las disposiciones pertinentes a la elección de diputados, esto incluye el sistema proporcional conocido como método o sistema D’Hondt, que desde las elecciones parlamentarias de 2017 reemplazó al antiguo sistema binominal.

Sooooo, it seems Chile is now proportional after all! Good! When are the US and UK going to become grownup democracies and do the same?? :laughing: The GOP/Dem and Tory/Labour duopolies will never allow it.

Anyway, I think that link goes some of the way to explaining how it works but not the whole way. So, again, in South Africa, we don’t vote for candidates, but a party represented by a candidate. This means that you can’t have more than one candidate for a party splitting the vote in any given constituency (which is what the Chilean ballot looked like it did before I read that link). Here is what a ward ballot looks like to elect a ward councillor.

South Africa solves the proportionality problem by using mixed member proportionality at the municipal level which means there is one ballot to have a direct representation for a constituency and one for for proportional representation so that smaller parties can get seats even if they don’t win any wards. In my opinion, this should be the system at all levels of government, but that’s a story for a different day.

Regardless, I think I understand how the Chilean ballot works now. They are basically trying to achieve the same thing with one ballot, which is confusing.

So, going back to my previous example, I now think it works like this:

Again, let’s say that there are 5 council seats and 10 voters in that comuna. 6 of them vote for UDI Candidate 323, while the other 4 voters give one vote each to Candidates 328, 329, 330 and 331, all from the SocDems. UDI Candidates 324 to 327 get 0. In this scenario, according to that link, UDI wins 3 seats and the SocDems get 2, which returns proportionality, but in this case, Candidate 323 for UDI has done all the heavy lifting for their UDI compatriots. Two of them go to council without ever having received a vote. I guess what it DOES do, is give the electorate some kind of influence in the rank order of representatives in each list, but it’s not much less opaque than having parties do it themselves, as is the case in South Africa. As @gringalais points out, information on these people is hard to come by so you are basically just taking a random guess. Rather leave that up to party structures which at least have some kind of vetting process internally.

More than this I can’t ascertain. Do we think I’m interpreting this correctly? I think I will have to actually read the electoral law to understand it completely which is an indictment on Chilean democracy to be honest.

I’m not sure if you’ve seen this link, but you can use it to see the policies of the various candidates. By selecting the relevant candidate, clicking on the red dot and clicking Ver programa, it takes you to a PDF of the candidate’s platform which is quite convenient rather than googling.

That said, as you pointed out, there aren’t programmes listed for the lower levels of government, so not entirely useful.

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The other thing I’ve noticed, is that I live in Ñuñoa, but my alcalde and consejales candidates are for Providencia. I have no idea how this happened because I have lived for eight years at the same address which I used for my applications for both temporaria and definitiva.

So, I think I’m just going to spoil my votes for those.

I’ll see if there’s anything, thanks.

Wow, that was the longest line I’ve ever had to wait in to vote and I have voted in every election even before mandatory came back except one local one since I obtained the right to vote.

Easy for me as I did a populist right straight Republican vote except for the Concejal-San Antonio where I had to choose one of the 7 Repubs and I let my sexist instincts say to choose a woman which left it to two choices and then beforehand I asked my wife should I vote for a Maria or a Carmen and Carmen it was.

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This is what I don’t get. You have to basically pick between randos (randas?) you know nothing about based on what?

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We went yesterday,

My husband went by public transit to his voting location because there’s no parking. He got there at about 2:00 and there were about 15 people in line at his table. He said it was the only one with a line. He always seems to have that bad luck.

Then, we went by car into downtown to my voting place. It’s a huge school, so it took a while to find my table. There were only three people waiting. But, an older couple showed up. The man was using crutches, so we let them go ahead. There was a tent set up nearby that said assisted voting for people with mobility issues, I’m not quite sure why they didn’t go there instead, They may not have known that was available.

Why do you have separate voting stations?

I’m not sure, but it’s always been that way, both in La Reina and now in Buin. Not once in 15 years have we voted at the same place. It’s really stupid. Since we’ve been here, both of us have had our locations changed almost every time. Only once here, did we have two locations in downtown walking distance from each other. So, we parked in a paid lot, walked to my place an then to his place.

My husband says that there’s an option to choose if your location is urban or rural. He changed his to rural and they put him in Alto Jahuel. I’m going to try selecting rural to see if maybe we end up in the same place…

Where do you change it because, as I suspected, I am registered in the wrong comuna. The voting table attendants confirmed that I should not be voting in Providencia considering I’m in Ñuñoa. They told me that the functionality on the website is only available “at some point before an election”. Anyway, the good Republicano-supporting people of Providencia got my support this cycle.

OK, I just got back from voting Republicano down the ticket. I’ve had three pleasant experiences at that voting station. No waiting time at all.

I was able to have a discussion with the attendants at the mesa about the electoral system. I understand that the people manning the tables are selected from the general public so probably don’t know how the actual system works, but one of them was a PoliSci graduate and I relayed the same example to him which I laid out earlier in this thread.

I could see that he was initially trying to defend the system, but then, as I continued, he conceded that the system for allocating seats to the legislatures appears to be flawed. They all agreed that the ballot was confusing. It’s frankly stunning that such a basic structural error could be made. There are thousands of examples from around the world to follow.

So, in the end, for consejeros and consejales, I just picked Republicano candidates at random.

I haven’t tried it yet, since I’m guessing it’s not possible to make changes during an election. From what I could find you need to enter the Servel site using your Clave Única. Changes aren’t allowed within 140 days of an election.

Servel

La ley indica que el Registro Electoral debe suspender sus modificaciones 140 días antes de un plebiscito o elección, hasta esa fecha entonces (8 de junio) ingresando al sitio servel.cl con su Clave Única, o bien de forma presencial, con su cédula de identidad en las Direcciones Regionales de Servel, en las oficinas de ChileAtiende, en consulados de Chile en el exterior y ante el Registro Civil (al solicitar cédula de identidad puede indicar la actualización del domicilio electoral) se puede realizar la solicitud de modificación.

I’ll report back once I try it.

When I go, the vocales usually want to talk to me about my strange last name and where I’m from. I’m from the US but have a very long German last name, an unusual (French) first name, and everyone thinks I look German. When I finish voting, my husband always asks me, “¿causaste sensación?”