RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Peruvian presidential candidate Pedro Castillo maintains a lead of 78,737 votes over his rival Keiko Fujimori when 97.28% of the votes have been counted in the second round of elections held this Sunday in Peru.
According to the last official report, the candidate of the leftist Peru Libre party has received so far 50.23% of the valid votes (8,596,896) against 49.77% (8,518,159) of the candidate of the right-wing Popular Force party.
This information already contains 99.17% of the votes cast at national level, while the counting of the votes of Peruvians abroad currently reaches 51.57%.
So far, 18.1 million people have voted in Peru, while 156,923 more have voted abroad.
Despite Castillo’s consistent advantage in the official count, Fujimori assured on Monday that he remains “optimistic” that “the vote will even out” when the votes cast abroad are finished, where she has wide favoritism.
In fact, the arrival of the overseas vote meant that for the first time since the recount began, Fujimori recovered votes against Castillo.
However, a small percentage of votes from remote rural and jungle areas of Peru, which are considered favorable to Castillo, also remain to be counted.
Although Fujimori also denounced an alleged intention of fraud on the part of Castillo’s legal representatives and supporters, this claim has been widely rejected by electoral bodies, international observers, and specialists.
Castillo, on the other hand, remains silent this Tuesday, after having affirmed on Monday that he will be “the first to make the will of the Peruvian people be respected” and saluting the “citizen vigil for democracy” that his followers are holding outside the National Office of Electoral Processes (ONPE) in Lima.
The electoral body launched, on its part, an alert in its social networks to ask to be “careful with false news about the electoral records”, after which it explained how and in which cases these are observed.