GUATEMALA CITY (AP) – The fight for certify the results The first round of Guatemala’s presidential election has suffered another setback after the president of the Supreme Court issues an order blocking certification.
Chief justice Silvia Valdés Quezada issued the unusual order on Friday afternoon. He stipulated that the process could not move forward until the electoral authorities who conducted a review of the ballot papers for the June 25 election report back to him on their methods and the inconsistencies found.
Valdés Quezada said they had to do it in 12 hours.
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Reviews witnessed by the AP found that the incorrectly marked or counted votes accounted for less than 1 percent of the total, not enough to change the results.
Experts said Saturday that Valdés Quezada’s order was strange because he was the only justice to sign it. Under normal procedure, it should have been signed by all 13 judges.
“She alone suspends the electoral process,” said constitutional lawyer Alejandro Balsells.
Ovidio Orellana, the former head of Guatemala’s bar association, wrote on his social media accounts that this order “should be signed by all magistrates.”
If candidates Sandra Torres and upstart Bernardo Arévalo are still the top two voters in the re-examination, it will increase the likelihood that their one-two finish in the first round will hold and that both candidates will head to a runoff election on August 20.
The Supreme Electoral Court said in a statement Friday that the review “confirms the preliminary results published on June 25” and urged political parties “to maturely accept the election results, which represent the legitimate will of the people.”
Edie Cux, director of Citizen Action, the local section of the non-governmental organization Transparency International, said on Friday that the electoral court must now endorse the findings of several days of review of the tally sheets prepared by 152 of the more than 122,000 polling stations.
“The result has not changed, the review period has practically closed and, as established by law, they must now certify the results and assign positions for the second round of elections,” said Cux.
David de León, a spokesman for the electoral court, said the court expected to certify the results next week after receiving the contested counts and necessary changes made to the vote totals.
The vote counts were announced shortly after the June 25 election, however the Constitutional Court—the highest in the country—suspended the certification of the official results of the electionsgranting a temporary injunction to 10 parties — one later withdrew — that contested the results, saying they suspected they were robbed of votes.
The matter now belongs to the Supreme Court of Justice, which the Constitutional Court appointed to handle the case.
In an extremely crowded field, neither Arévalo nor Torres received 50% of the vote, so they were scheduled to face off in a runoff on August 20.
Arévalo, from the progressive party Moviment Llavor, was a surprise, as he had not been voting among the main candidates. Torres, the candidate of the conservative party UNE, is running for the presidency for the third time.
The legal challenge had raised fears that political forces could be trying to invalidate the June 25 election.
On Sunday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a statement that the US government endorsed the findings of numerous national and international election observation groups, “which found that the results published in the election most observed in Guatemala match their observations throughout the country.”
“The United States supports the constitutional right of the people of Guatemala to choose their leaders through free and fair elections and is deeply concerned about efforts to interfere with the outcome of the June 25 election,” the statement said.
Among the parties questioning the results are three candidates who were polling among the leaders ahead of election day but ended up getting less than 8% of the vote each. However, Torres’ party has also asked that the vote tally be reviewed.
