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One day before the plebiscite that will decide the future of the Constitution, they still persist differences over criteria that will be applied with respect to people who do not respect the sanitary standards established in this context of a pandemic. Although the rule is clear and those who are sick with Covid-19 or are serving quarantine they cannot vote, the matter is not entirely clear with respect to the situations that may occur inside the polling stations.
This Friday the regional prosecutor of Biobío, Marcela cartagena, was interviewed in the program that makes the National Prosecutor’s Office through his Instagram. In the conversation, Cartagena referred to the behaviors that may be a crime during the plebiscite and the criteria of the Public Ministry to prosecute violators of the Article 318 of the Penal Code, which is the norm that establishes crimes against public health.
The persecutor assured that this electoral act, in the midst of a pandemic, causes a clash of rights:
Here two rights collide. My right to vote, my right to express my vote and the right to protect the health of the collective, of society. When rights collide, decisions must be made. Here an individual right is faced with a collective right and that makes the balance tilt towards the collective. The right to vote is important, totally, but here people’s lives are at stake.
Marcela Cartagena, regional prosecutor of Biobío
Then Cartagena was asked the following query: “If a person entered the premises to vote, they are in line and they have Covid-19. What happens? First you vote and then you are criminally prosecuted? “
When asked, the Biobío persecutor assured that in that case the person will be detained and will not be able to vote. “If that is detected, that person is in flagrante delicto committing a crime and can and should be arrested. We cannot begin to say ‘now, ma’am, just vote’. No. The infected person who goes out onto the public highway commits a crime, he knows that he is sick, he is committing a crime. So it’s not like we’re going to stop for a little longer. No, you are detained and you enter the path of a crime that is being committed in flagrante delicto, nothing else to do, ”Cartagena explained.
His words refute the criteria the Servel had set. On September 15, the president of the governing body of the organization, Patricio Santamaría, said that in situations like that “the first thing to do is respect their right to vote.”
Consulted by the sayings of Cartagena, the helmsman of the Servel reaffirmed his criteria and assured Third what “What the law establishes is that those who commit crimes have the right to vote. Being in a polling station they cannot be stopped ”.
Santamaría added that “If a person creates disorders in a room, the president of the polling station orders that it be detained and there you have to ask the person, did he vote? If you have not voted, you have to vote and then be arrested and be prosecuted if appropriate.
Along the same lines, he indicated that “If you are already in the premises you have to vote and later you will be criminally prosecuted by the prosecution and, in addition, the corresponding health summary will be opened that is accompanied by a fine.”
Through an email sent by the head of the Crimes Against Organized Crime Unit, Mauricio Fernandez, with sender to all regional prosecutors in the country, the national prosecutor, Jorge Abbott, instructed how the Public Ministry will act during this Sunday’s plebiscite in the event of possible infractions.
The national prosecutor’s team explained that “The exercise of the right to vote by a single infected person constitutes an ideal behavior to put the health and even the lives of many people at risk, making it possible to generate a chain of infections.”
Abbott’s instruction to the prosecutors was as follows: “Covid-19 patients who concur to exercise the right to vote, violating the isolation order that weighs on them as a health measure, carry a communicable disease that is capable of putting the right to individual health of an undetermined number of people is at risk, people who could be exposed to close or close contact with the offender, in areas where there will be an agglomeration that undoubtedly favors contagion ”.
Along these lines, he added that “given the current rules of Chilean law and seen the problem from the perspective of constitutional law, it is possible to conclude that: (1) the restriction of the right to vote is fully justified in the case of Covid- 19 and (2) that, in this context, the right to vote cannot be used as a cause of justification, since it does not constitute, under the prevailing conditions, the legitimate exercise of a right ”.
