Asier Vera San Salvador

San Salvador

Updated Tuesday, February 6, 2024-19:09

  • Podcast The Bukele phenomenon sweeps El Salvador and Latin America: "God has chosen him"

  • El Salvador From fighting gangs to defeating them: the challenge of Bukele's second term

The Supreme Electoral Tribunal

has declared failed the preliminary scrutiny of the presidential

and legislative elections in El Salvador last Sunday in which Nayib Bukele proclaimed himself the winner "according to our numbers with more than 85% of the votes and a minimum of 58 of 60 deputies in the Legislative Assembly." For this reason, the presiding magistrate, Dora Esmeralda Martínez de Barahona,

has announced that they will open 2,547 of the 8,562 ballot boxes in the presidential election

, as well as one hundred percent of the legislative election to count "vote by vote."

Although several world leaders have already congratulated Bukele for his victory, it has not yet been made official by the TSE, because it

has only been possible to count 70.25% of the minutes processed

(6,015) that grant 1 .6 million votes for the Nuevas Ideas candidate, ten times more than his main rival Manuel 'El Chino' Flores, of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, who obtained 139,025 votes.

Meanwhile, in the Legislative Assembly it has only been possible to count 5.06 percent of the minutes, which represents 434 of 8,562, which is why the TSE

has decided to open all the ballot boxes for the legislative elections,

as well as 30% that remains to be counted in the presidential elections, so that, in total, 11,109 ballot boxes will be opened, following complaints received by opposition parties due to failures in the system for transmitting electoral results.

Disadvantages

It will be this Tuesday when the TSE begins the final count, accepting only, for the moment, the 6,015 presidential election count records that could be digitized and transmitted, while it will discard the manual records that, at 2:12 a.m. on Monday, it ordered to be carried out at Vote Receiving Boards, "due to multiple actions that have hindered the development of activities for transmitting preliminary results and due to lack of security paper and other factors beyond the control of the TSE." For now, the only explanation that the president of the TSE has given

for making this decision to count vote by vote

is that "some inconveniences made it difficult for the transmission to flow as planned."

On the other hand, he explained that, in the case of the presidential election, the so-called electoral packages of the 2,547 Vote Receiving Boards

that failed to transmit results

will be opened and this process will be carried out before the Attorney General's Office, the Attorney General's Office. the Defense of Human Rights, political parties, the Electoral Surveillance Board and international observers.

In the case of the election of the 60 deputies of the Legislative Assembly, the TSE announced

that 100% of the electoral packages will be opened

, since "due to the complexity of counting whole votes, fractional votes and preference marks for candidates "It was not possible to transmit most of the minutes.

Anomalies

Local media published on election day that anomalies had occurred,

such as duplicating the results of ballots entered into the system

, while a technician assured that it could have been a programming error in the software for counting the table, based on the 2021 elections, when there were 84 deputies and not the current 60 that the Legislative Assembly approved at Bukele's proposal.

Likewise, these media published that citizens who formed the Vote Receiving Boards

denounced the failure of the transmission system

, slow internet connection, lack of paged paper to print the minutes and even system errors that doubled and tripled the votes for the party. official, New Ideas.

For its part, the Popular Resistance and Rebellion Block, made up of left-wing social and popular organizations,

called Sunday's presidential and legislative elections "electoral fraud"

and rejected Bukele's self-proclamation as the winner. Thus, he denounced that, to guarantee "fraud" in favor of the ruling party, "the regime also illegally modified the electoral system and violated many legal provisions within the framework of the campaign." Therefore, he assured that "he does not recognize the illegal electoral results or the de facto regime that will emerge from this electoral farce."