Paraguay closes polling stations Sunday after electing its municipal officials

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The polling stations closed their doors this Sunday (10) in Paraguay after ten hours of voting. More than four million people were eligible to elect the mayors and council members of the districts of the country.

The Electoral Justice advised that the number of eliigible voters who did vote should have exceeded 50%, without having all the data.

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“We can assure that 100% of the [registration and verification] tables have been enabled in 1,135 voting places. We are convinced that this day has exceeded 50% participation. We qualify the citizen participation as positive”, said the director of Electoral Resources, Luis Salas.

After the scrutiny, data will be sent to the Preliminary Electoral Results Transmission System (TREP), disclosed in real-time through the agency’s social networks.

Fausto Von Streber, director of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), emphasized that the TREP is preliminary, informal, and non-binding. However, its “margin of error is practically null with the single instance count”.

The municipal elections, which were scheduled for last year and were postponed due to the pandemic, are the first in Paraguay with unblocked lists and electronic voting machines.

The process counted on several observation missions, one of them that of the Organization of American States (OAS), which will draft recommendations.

The ruling Colorado Party and the Liberal Party, the largest opposition party, have the most candidates for the positions to be elected: 831 for mayors and 15,535 for council members.

During the campaign, there have been several acts of violence, with the murder of three candidates for municipal positions, one of them being a Colorado candidate.

The results of the elections are seen as the beginning of the strategies of the political formations to forge lists and alliances for 2023 when the presidential and legislative elections will be held.