Electoral chaos in El Salvador due to the counting of Assembly votes

In El Salvador there are two electoral speeds.

Nayib Bukele left on Sunday at seven in the afternoon, two hours after the polls closed, to announce that his party, Nuevas Ideas, had obtained 58 of the 60 deputies to the Legislative Assembly.

However, this Tuesday the country still has no official results.

The Supreme Electoral Tribunal has recognized in a conference that the preliminary recount system failed on election night, so only 5% of the records could be scrutinized.

As a consequence, they do not have data on how the seats in the Assembly, a key body in the Bukele Government, will be distributed, and all the ballot boxes will have to be opened again to count ballot by ballot.

The Supreme Electoral Tribunal had everything ready.

In a large press room, the magistrates, led by the president, Dora Martínez de Barahona, would give the conference to announce the results of the presidential and legislative elections.

However, the only thing that could be announced was a confusing statement, at 2 in the morning, which warned that manual minutes were going to be issued "due to multiple actions that have hindered the development of transmission activities."

The website they had enabled to follow the progress was down or had duplicate results.

Thus, with 14% of the ballots processed, 900,000 votes were reported (800,000 for Nayib Bukele) for an electoral roll of just over five million people.

The numbers didn't work.

Votes also appeared counted for locations that had not yet been processed.

Hours ago, Bukele had declared himself the winner with 85% of the votes, according to his own numbers, and the international congratulations had already arrived.

The president enjoys undeniable popularity.

In March 2022, Nayib Bukele began an emergency regime under which he has detained 76,000 people and dismantled the gangs.

He has also detained thousands of innocent people, according to human rights organizations.

The president focused his campaign on having made El Salvador, which led the ranking of violent deaths on the continent, become the safest country after Canada.

It was an irrefutable achievement, no one in the country wants to return to the terror of the gangs.

Nayib Bukele speaks from the National Palace with his wife, Gabriela Rodríguez de Bukele, on February 4. Gladys Serrano

Along the way, the president decided to adjust the State's way.

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 that is prohibited in the Magna Carta of El Salvador.

Also last year he 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 the Executive's measures—from 85 to 60, as well as the counting formula, which became D'Hont, which favors formations that have more votes.

At the same time he reduced the mayoralties from 262 to 44, in what electoral expert Ruth Eleonora López defines as a “concentration of power.”

In another controversial measure, Bukele decided not to give the opposition parties the so-called political debt, the funds to which they are entitled for each vote collected in the previous elections.

As a result, during the entire electoral campaign, only Nueva Ideas had money to put up posters, advertisements on television and radio, and call events.

Furthermore, thanks to his control of the Electoral Court, Nayib Bukele was able to skip the electoral silence; on the same Sunday, in a conference for international media, he asked for a vote for his deputies, to guarantee that he could follow the emergency regime that needs to be approved every month. in the Assembly.

With this background scenario came the problems of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal system, which had a budget of 130 million dollars for the elections.

They had done a couple of simulations with how the data transmission system was going to work, but they did not measure the Internet capacity that the 8,562 vote reception boards would need to issue their minutes on election night.

The system was saturated.

In addition, the

software

also began to show errors, which have not yet been explained, which caused the votes to be duplicated.

The fix was announced the next morning.

The presidential election, much easier to count because it only requires marking the candidate, 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. , of rights.

However, the legislative count has only reached 5%.

“The transmission of preliminary electoral results, despite all the institutional efforts made, was not possible to conclude in the expected manner,” said the president of the Electoral Tribunal in a conference on Monday.

To issue an official result, the Court will open 30% of the votes to elect president and 100% of the votes for deputies.

A voting center in El Salvador, on February 4. Welcome Velasco (EFE)

The ballot boxes, which in El Salvador are called electoral packages, from the 14 departments have been transferred since Monday night to a warehouse of the Electoral Tribunal in the capital to be counted one by one.

The last time that happened in 2015 only in San Salvador, according to a source who worked at the institution, it took almost a month to count the votes.

However, Guillermo Wellman, magistrate of the court, has indicated that they hope to have the official count in 15 days: “I cannot detail what happened because it would be irresponsible, but they are not significant facts that could alter the result,” he said about the causes.

In the country, the legislative election is complex to count since the entire vote can be cast for a party, and from there the preference can be expressed for a candidate, or divided among several formations.

It is the so-called crossed vote, which fluctuates around 5% in each election.

This official count of each ballot will be monitored, according to the Government, by the prosecutor's office, international observers and political parties.

In front of the noise of the cars, a protest of a few dozen women demanded on Monday that fraud be avoided by banging pots and pans.

Electoral expert Malcolm Cartagena points out to EL PAÍS that "various actions have affected the electoral integrity of the election" and mentions that the failure of the preliminary count is another of the elements of the electoral process - such as the rules of the game, the formula, not delivering political debt or impart electoral justice—that have been manipulated.

The Legislative Assembly was Nayib Bukele's obsession from the beginning.

The president knows that he does not need to campaign for himself thanks to his immense popularity, but he needs the people to elect their deputies in order to implement the measures.

“The election of deputies is even more important,” he said at a press conference on Sunday.

It is also in that institution where the opposition parties hoped to be able to balance the scales a little more.

For now, all we have to do is wait.

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