RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The tally of last Sunday’s Peruvian presidential elections leaves Pedro Castillo, from the far left, as the most voted candidate. The objective data is not enough to clarify yet who will be the president of the country and even less to know when the electoral court will promulgate the winner.
Keiko Fujimori, from the authoritarian right, requested the annulment of nearly 200,000 votes and claimed an alleged “table fraud” that no one, except her staunch supporters and her political fellow travelers have seen.
These are some of the keys that explain the situation.
1) VOTES
With 99.935% of the votes counted, Castillo has a 49,420-vote lead over Fujimori, and the recount has been going on for a week. However, since Monday, it has been clear that the rural teacher’s lead over the daughter and political heir of former president Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000) is unassailable.
The vote of Peruvians abroad did not come either in the number or in the proportion that Fujimori needed to reverse the overwhelming support that Castillo obtained in the rural interior of the country, nor did the recount of some 1,000 tally sheets observed ex officio by the electoral authorities or the more than 400 that were denounced at the polling stations by the party representatives.
Fujimori claimed that her rivals monitored all the counting sheets and that there were 300,000 votes that benefited her. 56 of these ballots have yet to be counted.
2) CRAZY RECOUNT
Election Sunday was a roller coaster of emotions: Fujimori was the winner according to the exit poll and celebrated with her family as if she had won the Presidency. After a while, the quick count gave Castillo as the winner and the joy gave way to drama.
There were other changes. The first data at the polling station gave Fujimori a big lead, and the party was already beginning to celebrate. But there was a catch. It was already known in Peru that the first data calculated are always those of the big cities, Fujimori’s main fiefdoms.
With the arrival of the rural vote, Castillo recovered ground and surpassed Fujimori by several tens of thousands of votes, who already began to sow doubts about the electoral process on Monday.
3) FRAUD
After a day of silence, Fujimori came out on Monday night to denounce the existence of “a systematic fraud”, without reliable proof, and no international electoral observation body, among them the Organization of American States (OAS), has detected anything.
However, for the pro-Fujimori supporters, things such as inconsistencies in the signatures of the members of the polling stations, the fact that no votes were received in some of them, or that presidents and voting officers in some polling stations were relatives are proof of “fraud”.
They say that everything is part of a “systematic” plan hatched by Peru Libre, Castillo’s party, to influence the electoral result.
On Wednesday, Fujimori went a step further and announced, “to defend the vote”, that she was asking to annul some 804 “fraudulent” tally sheets, equivalent to 200,000 votes concentrated in areas overwhelmingly favorable to Castillo.
4) ANNULMENT OF VOTES
Fujimori and Castillo, who also filed some petitions for annulment, had until Wednesday, June 9 at 8 p.m. to present their claims for annulment.
Hours before the deadline, an “army” of lawyers from prestigious law firms in Lima “voluntarily” set out to search for evidence of “fraud at the polling station” and file the lawsuits that would annul every electoral record, meaning that the votes of some 200 citizens would be erased from the overall tally.
Given the seriousness of the step, the law requires justifying the measure with clear and reliable evidence of violence, bribery, bribery, or threats. Almost all Peruvian electoral experts agree in pointing out that inconsistency in a signature or “not having received votes” does not constitute sufficient evidence to annul anything.
5) NATIONAL ELECTORAL JURY
However, the vast majority of the pro-Fujimori claims arrived either after the deadline, or without having paid the corresponding fees, or with other formal defects that make them unacceptable.
Calculations differ in the number of cases admissible for review and who filed the complaint, as Perú Libre also requested several nullities.
In any case, there should be no fewer than 150 and no more than 270 cases susceptible to be thoroughly assessed by the Special Electoral Juries (JEE), the regional bodies that in first instance must judge the cases.
In this context, the National Jury of Elections (JNE), the Peruvian supreme electoral body, carried out a strange maneuver when, at the request of the pro-Fujimori supporters, it decided to extend by 48 hours the term to admit these appeals for processing.
In the making, a “coup d’état” denounced Perú Libre, while thousands of citizens expressed their indignation for a measure that changed the rules of the game in the middle of the race. After a day of growing tensions, the JNE reconsidered its measure after verifying that this step transgressed numerous legal norms, including several established by the Constitutional Court.
6) DEADLINES AND RESOLUTIONS
With the data from the tally sheets under consideration, the progress of which can be publicly followed on the JNE website set up for this purpose, only about 60,000 votes would be at stake.
The JEE’s initial decisions indicate that the pro-Fujimori complaints do not have the necessary evidence to be considered and will therefore be dismissed.
According to the norm, the JEE has three days to make its decisions, but this time limit can be a bit more lax, and then the affected parties could appeal to the JNE, which is possible. The JNE also has three days to make decisions, but this deadline is also relatively lax and depends on a lot of applications to be considered.
Each case must be analyzed individually, so there would still be a minimum of four days to put a conclusive position of the court on record that cannot be appealed. Some voices, therefore, point to a maximum of two weeks before a decision is reached.
And that doesn’t mean that the parties can’t bring other actions before the instances that they think are pertinent.