GUATEMALA CITY (AP) – The fight to certify the results of Guatemala’s first-round presidential election suffered what experts called another setback Saturday after the president of the Supreme Court issued an order blocking the certification
Chief justice Silvia Valdés Quezada issued the unusual order on Friday afternoon. He stipulated that the process could not move forward until the election authorities who conducted a review of the vote tally sheets for the June 25 election briefed him on their methods and any inconsistencies found.
Valdés Quezada said they had to do it in 12 hours.
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.
The mission of electoral observers of the Organization of American States has expressed in a statement on Saturday that it is concerned about “the attempt to continue judicializing the electoral process”.
The OAS group said the review of the record sheet “was carried out satisfactorily, complying with the principles of maximum transparency and public access.”
Experts said 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 remain the top two pollsters in the rerun, it will increase the likelihood that their one-two finish in the first round will hold and both candidates will head to a runoff. elections 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 count was announced shortly after the June 25 election, but the Constitutional Court—the country’s highest—suspended the certification of official election results, granting a provisional order to 10 parties—one later dropped out—that contested the results, saying they suspected votes were stolen.
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 Moviment Llavor party, was a surprise, as he had not been polling 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.
