There are two speeds of voting in El Salvador. Nayib Bukele left at seven in the afternoon on Sunday, two hours after polls closed, to announce that his Nuevas Ideas party had won 58 of the 60 deputies for the legislative assembly. However, the country does not yet have any official results this Tuesday. The Supreme Election Court acknowledged in a conference that the preliminary recount system failed on election night, allowing only 5% of records to be verified. As a result, they have no data on how seats are distributed in the Assembly, a key body of the Bukele government, and all ballot boxes must be reopened to count ballot by ballot.
The Supreme Electoral Court had prepared everything. In a large press room, the judges, led by President Dora Martínez de Barahona, held the conference to announce the results of the presidential and parliamentary elections. However, only at 2 a.m. could a confusing statement be announced warning that manual logs would be issued “due to numerous measures that have hindered the development of transmission activities.”
The website they had enabled to track progress was unavailable or had duplicate results. Thus, with 14% of ballots processed, 900,000 votes were reported (800,000 for Nayib Bukele), which corresponds to a voter roll of just over five million people. The numbers didn't work. Votes were also counted for locations that had not yet been processed. Hours ago, Bukele said he had declared himself the winner with 85% of the vote, and the international congratulations had already arrived.
The president enjoys undeniable popularity. In March 2022, Nayib Bukele introduced an emergency regime under which he arrested 76,000 people and dismantled the gangs. According to human rights organizations, thousands of innocent people were also arrested. The president focused his campaign on making El Salvador, which topped the continent's rankings for violent deaths, the safest country after Canada. It was an irrefutable achievement, no one in the country wants to return to gang terror.
Nayib Bukele speaks with his wife Gabriela Rodríguez de Bukele from the National Palace on February 4. Gladys Serrano
Along the way, the president decided to adjust the state's path. Since 2021, he dismissed the Attorney General and the judges of the Constitutional Court to appoint similar figures who later allowed him to run for re-election, something prohibited by El Salvador's Magna Carta. Last year he also decided to change the rules of the game. He announced an electoral reform that reduced the number of deputies in the Legislative Assembly – necessary to approve executive actions – from 85 to 60, as well as the counting formula that became D'Hont and the formations with the most votes favored. . At the same time, mayoral positions were reduced from 262 to 44, which election expert Ruth Eleonora López describes as a “concentration of power.”
In another controversial move, Bukele decided not to pay opposition parties the so-called political debt, the money owed to them for each vote collected in previous elections. As a result, throughout the election campaign, only Nueva Ideas had money to put up posters, advertisements on television and radio, and calls for events. Furthermore, Nayib Bukele was able to skip electoral silence thanks to his control over the electoral court; that same Sunday, in a conference for international media, he called for a vote for his deputies to ensure that he could follow the emergency regime, which must be approved every month. in the meeting.
With this background scenario came the problems of the Supreme Electoral Court system, which had a budget of 130 million dollars for the elections. They had done some simulations of how the data transmission system would work, but they did not measure the Internet capacity that the 8,562 election reception committees would need to issue their minutes on election night. The system was saturated. In addition, the software also revealed errors that had not yet been resolved, which led to duplicate votes. The solution was announced the next morning.
The presidential election, which is much easier to count because it only requires the candidate to be marked, has reached 70% vote count with 1.6 million votes for Nayib Bukele, followed by 139,000 for the left-wing FMLN and 123,000 for ARENA. However, the legislative figure has only reached 5%. “Despite all institutional efforts, the transmission of the provisional election results could not be completed in the expected manner,” said the president of the electoral court in a conference on Monday. To declare an official result, the court will release 30% of the votes for the election of the president and 100% of the votes for the deputies.
A voting center in El Salvador, February 4th. Welcome Velasco (EFE)
The ballot boxes, which are called electoral packages in El Salvador, from the 14 departments have been brought to an electoral court warehouse in the capital since Monday evening to be counted individually. The last time this happened only in San Salvador in 2015. According to a source who worked in the institution, the counting of votes took almost a month. However, Guillermo Wellman, judge at the court, has indicated that they hope to receive the official count in 15 days: “I cannot describe in detail what happened because it would be irresponsible, but they are not significant facts that could change the outcome,” he said of the causes.
In this country, the counting of parliamentary elections is complex since the entire vote can be cast for one party and from there the preference can be expressed for a candidate or divided among several formations. This is the so-called cross vote, which fluctuates around 5% in every election. This official counting of each ballot will be monitored by prosecutors, international observers and political parties, according to the government. Amid the noise of cars, a protest rally of a few dozen women on Monday demanded that fraud by banging pots and pans should be avoided. Electoral expert Malcolm Cartagena points out to EL PAÍS that “various measures have compromised the electoral integrity of the election” and mentions that the failure of the provisional count is another element of the electoral process – such as the rules of the game, the formula, neither political debt still provides electoral justice – which were manipulated.
The Legislative Assembly has been Nayib Bukele's obsession from the start. The president knows that because of his immense popularity he does not have to campaign for himself, but rather that the people elect their deputies to implement the measures. “The election of representatives is all the more important,” he said at a press conference on Sunday. In this institution too, the opposition parties hoped to be able to make the scales a little more balanced. For now we just have to wait and see.
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