The “virtual ballot box” opened on January 6th received hardly any votes for president and vice president from 118,563 online voters from midnight on January 6th to noon on Tuesday, January 23rd, out of a total of 739,925 Salvadorans entitled to exercise this right are. according to a review in the newspaper La Prensa Gráfica.
The number was also lower in the election of representatives to the Legislative Assembly, with 105,937 electronic ballots cast, 12,626 fewer than in the electronic presidential election.
It has been 17 days since electronic voting was activated at an event on the night of January 5 in a hotel in the capital, and since then the total of voters who voted is no longer significant if we count the number of those consider those who are able to do so if there are only 12 days left until the virtual ballot box closes.
Sources indicate that this may have affected opposition parties' appeal to their supporters to vote in person at the 81 centers set up abroad, thereby preventing them from losing votes for assembly candidates in the interior.
The rules stipulate that votes for representatives only go to candidates in San Salvador, where the Nuevas Ideas party has great strength.
Only Salvadorans with a unique identity document (DUI) with a residential address abroad can participate in online voting.
So far, the number of people who voted for the presidency is only about 15 percent of the electoral roll closed on November 5 by the National Register of Natural Persons (RNPN), while among deputies it is just over 13.6 percent of the registered votes.
When voting began, the average number was between 13,000 and 14,000 voters per day, falling to 2,532 and 3,908 votes, respectively, according to election board records.
An assessment by the newspaper El Mundo assumes that the reflections of the President of the Legislative Assembly, Ernesto Castro, that it is progress because “in the last election the participation was minimal” do not correspond to the current situation that has existed since then not on this occasion the use of propaganda and resources that now exist to get Salvadorans to vote.
In the 2019 presidential election with postal voting, 350,638 people were registered to vote, of which only 3,808 voted, which is just over one percent.
mem/lb