A man casts his vote in Quillacollo, in the Bolivian department of Cochabamba.FERNANDO CARTAGENA / AFP
The elections in Bolivia were held without notable incidents, with high population attendance and a large presence of military and police personnel in the streets.
There were long lines in front of the polling stations because biosecurity measures due to covid-19 slowed down the voting procedure.
Contrary to what was feared, citizens who had been nominated as electoral juries attended and remained at the polls for the nine hours that they were open.
Official voting results will not be known on Sunday.
The count is expected to end on Monday, but it can last until Tuesday and even longer.
The only reference about what happened on the day will come from the private polls that will be announced in the main media.
These polls will be known in a few hours.
“We want to highlight the tranquility of the citizens.
Citizens were patient, because the day had unique characteristics due to the need we had to adapt to the challenges of the coronavirus.
The voting has been slower, but it has flowed.
Our balance is satisfactory ”, summarized Salvador Romero, president of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal.
Despite the division of voting hours to avoid crowds, the schools where the polls were placed were overflowing with people.
In Bolivia voting is compulsory and the absenteeism rate is traditionally very low (between 10 and 15% of registered voters).
It was assumed that this time, due to the pandemic, there would be less participation of the middle classes than of the lower classes of the population, which could favor Luis Arce, the candidate of the Movement for Socialism (MAS) of Evo Morales.
This forecast is likely to prove wrong.
In the last week, the authorities of the interim government and the candidates against the MAS intensely requested that people not stop going to vote.
The night before the vote, large contingents of police, soldiers and military vehicles patrolled the streets of the main cities of Bolivia.
The schools that were voted on were also heavily guarded.
The Deputy Minister of Citizen Security, Wilson Santa María, published on social networks photographs of the troops with the phrase "We are taking care of them."
The exact number of troops mobilized is kept as a “state secret”.
“We do not take power by armed means.
We take power by democratic means, we understand that this is the way to do it, "said candidate Arce after casting his vote.
“I want to ask you not to fall for any kind of provocation.
The great lesson that we must never forget is that violence only generates violence and that with it we all lose ”, said Evo Morales from Buenos Aires, where he is a refugee.
The former president also referred to rumors about his imminent return to Bolivia, which his adversaries circulated in recent days with the aim of frightening urban voters who reject his figure.
"Given so much rumor about what I will do, I want to tell you that the priority is exclusively the recovery of democracy."
One of the most notable incidents has been the one suffered by the president of the Bolivian Senate, Eva Copa, who was rebuked and insulted when she was going to the electoral college in the city of El Alto.
Copa is part of the ranks of the Movimiento Al Socialismo (MAS) party, which polls have been pointing to as the winner during the electoral campaign.
Until now, the main problem in this election has been the suspension of the system for the rapid transmission of preliminary results, which should allow it to be known in a few hours who won the elections.
The Electoral Court decided this suspension this Saturday, after a test of the security of the system it had set up failed.
It was a new system, since the previous one had been questioned as one of the fraud mechanisms in the elections that were annulled, for this reason, a year ago.
At the time, the Morales government insisted that the quick count mechanism was not legally binding and that, therefore, its deficiencies could not be considered as evidence of fraud.
Now, the spokespersons of the MAS affirm that the annulment of this mechanism in these elections has proved them right: the only count with legal value is the physical one, which in 2019 was less questioned than the other, although it was also considered fraudulent.
This counting of the voting minutes normally lasts several days.
Until this process is complete, only survey data will be available, which is often imprecise in a country with a large territory and many rural populations that are difficult to access.
Some analysts fear that the prolonged lack of information will lead to speculation and sabotage.
The population is strongly polarized between those who want the MAS to return to power and those who passionately reject this possibility.
Both the MAS and candidate Luis Fernando Camacho strongly criticized the Electoral Tribunal for its inability to organize a quick count system. "We have our own electoral control system," Evo Morales warned. "We cannot believe anything they do," Camacho lamented after voting in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, the capital of the region that will define these elections. If Camacho gets a lot of support in Santa Cruz, it will complicate the possibility that the second in the polls, former President Carlos Mesa, will get close enough to the favorite Arce that a ballot is necessary, which, according to the polls, would lead to Table to the presidency. To win directly in the first round, Arce requires 40% of the votes and an advantage of at least 10 percentage points over the second.