Peru’s Foreign Ministry denies accusations of vote manipulation

In the note, the ministry said it rejects “any allegation that attributes acts of interference, manipulation, political favoritism or alteration of electoral material to its consular officials”.

The accusations were made by Sánchez on Thursday (18). “Changing the rules for the second round at the request of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is a serious blow to the electoral process. They broke the chain of custody. We simply want them to show us what happened”, said the leftist, according to information from the newspaper El País.

“With these rules, they manipulated the vote. In such a fierce process, there is no room for controversy. This process is not over yet,” he said.

In the statement released today, the Peruvian Foreign Ministry reported that in the first round of elections, at the request of the National Office of Electoral Processes (Onpe, in its Spanish acronym), an application for digitizing electoral records was used as a complementary measure.

“As it is a new operational support tool, its use was not universal, being applied only in 108 of the 180 consulates that organized electoral processes abroad. This application did not replace the legal procedure for the physical delivery of the minutes, nor did it overlap with the powers of the electoral bodies”, said the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The ministry reported that, after the first round, several consular offices reported technical and operational difficulties in using the application, which led, in coordination with Onpe, to the decision not to use the tool in the second round, held on the 7th.

“This decision did not modify the Organic Elections Law nor did it change the legal procedure for the return of electoral material”, argued the ministry.

“The non-use of the application in the second round also did not create a gap in the chain of custody nor a period without control of the electoral material. From the end of voting, the results were documented in sealed minutes and published transparently in consular offices, and the electoral material was subjected to official security, integrity and traceability mechanisms during its removal, including transportation via diplomatic bag, always accompanied by consular officials as diplomatic couriers”, explained the ministry, which highlighted that all electoral records and The voting ballots used arrived intact at the Onpe headquarters in Lima, “as proven by the respective receipts”.

The ministry also reported that the Peruvian consulates facilitated the participation of representatives of political organizations and the supervision of the competent authorities and that the process was monitored by employees of the Peruvian Electoral Court in Buenos Aires and other consulates, as well as by international observers and representatives of the Public Defender’s Office.

This week, Sánchez had a request to annul votes abroad rejected by the courts, and his party, Together for Peru, stated that it will not recognize the results of the second round.

Of the 92,766 voting minutes in Peru and abroad – documents that count the votes per candidate in each electoral section –, 92,327 have already had their numbers counted in the count.

Conservative Keiko Fujimori currently has 50.118% of the valid votes, against Sánchez’s 49.882%. Fujimori’s lead is almost 44 thousand votes at the moment.

The final result depends on the analysis of the remaining 439 minutes, which could take weeks. More than 1,600 minutes were sent to the Peruvian Electoral Court for review due to inconsistencies such as signature errors and arithmetic discrepancies.