The PASO elections must be repealed

It is understandable to impose the obligation of elective voting to prevent the party discipline of ultra groups from prevailing over the laxity and apathy of those who see politics as something foreign, because they dedicate themselves to working on their own.

But making consultative voting mandatory and making people pay that enormous cost is not democratization: it is state coercion.

The PASO also generate a federal problem: provinces must subordinate their political calendars to a decision made by the National Executive Power, given the simultaneity that governs the system.

The Open, Simultaneous, and Mandatory Primaries -PASO- began in 2009, when Cristina Kirchner conceived law 26.571, grandiosely justified as a "Democratization of Political Representation, Transparency, and Electoral Equity." Fifteen years later, reality has shown that it did not democratize, make transparent, or achieve equity in anything. The system was applied for the first time in 2011 and then in 2015, 2019, and 2023.

It apparently proposed that instead of top-level agreements, it would be the citizens who defined the candidates of each party. Whether affiliated or not, everyone could vote regardless of their affiliation, simultaneously on the same day, but it would be mandatory for voters and for the parties.

In reality, the PASO are a preliminary election to the definitive one, forcing more than 35 million people to vote, deploying security forces, vehicles, postal systems, school buildings, and polling authorities. Millions of ballots are printed and distributed, and thousands of ballot boxes that become trash within a few days. An overwhelming logistics operation must cover the entire territory of the 8th largest country in the world.

Billions of pesos paid by the same people who lack sufficient security, health, and other essential services but vote in the PASO every 4 years, only to have to repeat the entire process to vote for candidates 60 days later.

People are forced to vote and pay twice for something that only requires one election.

The cost of this duplication is enormous: in 2023, total electoral spending was among the highest since 2009. It is the work of the people, turned into their money, confiscated via taxes, just so that the political class saves the money that they should put out of their own pockets for those who really benefit from the PASO.

Time has shown that the promise to “democratize” the selection of candidates was pure hypocrisy, because the vast majority of parties presented single lists in all the PASO.

And there is something more serious: the PASO are a mandatory survey paid for by us, with negative externalities in the economic, financial, and political realms, which alters the election that really matters, and makes us lose money twice: by paying for it and by suffering the consequences of the instability they provoke.

The most evident and extreme case was in 2019, because the almost 16 points that Alberto Fernández led over Macri triggered a currency run, abrupt devaluation, and inflationary spike that impoverished millions of Argentines. This electoral system, instead of consolidating democracy, weakened it and caused an economic crisis. It was not accidental, but structural.

On the other hand, none of the parties that defend the existence of the PASO explain the basics: why should people pay for the internal affairs of political parties? A party is, in political, legal, and economic terms, a voluntary association of citizens, whose internal disputes, organization, and candidates are private matters of its members.

If they want to vote for those who represent them, they must pay the cost just as each of us pays for our preferences in our own personal and social life. Freedom does not offer another option: people, even if we call it “the State,” should not have to pay for the internal affairs of Peronism, Radicalism, PRO, LLA, or anyone else.

It is the antithesis of democratization: it is the complete subjugation of all to the decisions of a very few, to the small group of party leaders who decide these measures and dress them in laws, decrees, and rulings that were conceived to guarantee our freedom, not the caste privileges of politicians.