The president of the board of directors of the Electoral Service (Servel), Andrés Tagle closed the review of sponsorships for the presidential election and described as “incredible” the case of Diego Ancalao, whose signatures were notarized before a dead notary.
In conversation with Estado Nacional de TVN, Tagle said that “signatures are always reviewed, one by one especially that of the notary (…) The next day an analysis was made, basically of the validity of each one; who is on the electoral register, who is a Chilean citizen, over 18 years of age.”
“At the working meeting on Tuesday, at 12:00 p.m., the manager reported so many signatures of this notary (…) and said ‘the notary Patricio Zaldívar’ and a lawyer jumped (and said): ‘no, he is dead’, he said.
“Our normal process was to review the validity of the notary. That’s always done. The reason is because the territorial signatures of candidates – parliamentarians, deputies, etc. – the sponsorships are for the territory. They have to be people from that electoral domicile with a notary from that place (or Civil Registry official to replace them),” he added.
Tagle said he was informed that same day and that the next day he came to see them “because I found this incredible. So I wanted to look at them and make sure personally.” Along these lines, the notary’s rubrics were compared with documents that he himself had signed, realizing that they were different.
“We came to the fact that there is no notary, therefore the sponsorships were null, therefore, the candidate did not reach the valid figure of 33,369, and that is why his candidacy was rejected. Period,” he closed.
Ancalao announced protection appeal
For his part, Diego Ancalao announced that he will file an appeal for protection against the Servel, accusing illegality in the rejection of his candidacy after not having been directly informed.
In this regard, Andrés Tagle said in Zero Tolerance that “the law says that it is notified by website (…) we determined the accepted and rejected candidates on Thursday and uploaded the resolution to the website on Friday.”
“You have five days, from Friday, to appeal to the Tricel (Election Qualification Tribunal), an appeal for protection has nothing to do here. A protection resource is not going to recover his candidacy,” he explained.
