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Elections in Peru: Highlights of a 12-hour election with incredibly tight first results
Fake news, false claims of fraud, sky-rocketing tension, street demonstrations, and some humor. Here’s the ICYMI article on the elections between Keiko Fujimori and Pedro Castillo. Peru will not have a definite winner until at least Thursday.
At 7 a.m. on Sunday, June 6, about 20-something million Peruvians started arriving to different voting centers to elect their new president for the next five years. This was the runoff of an election that started on Apr. 11, when the country voted for their new 130 Congress members as well.
It was a LONG day. Due to the pandemic, Peru’s office of electoral processes (ONPE) extended the voting session to a full 12-hour day, with voting centers closing at 7 p.m. Usually, Peruvians vote on a Sunday, when most blue-collar workers have a day off and few people have an excuse not to vote, but the schedule is from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. — a bit less than your 9- to 10-hour office day.
So, what happened? Well, there is no definite winner yet. Because, similar to the U.S., vote counting takes time. Some journalists and other experts I follow estimate the final…
