International observers confirm irregularities in the final vote count; Opposition parties decry fraud, social movement organizations call for election to be nullified

On February 11, four out of the five alternate magistrates who make up El Salvador’s highest electoral authority, the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE), separated themselves from the decisions being made regarding the February 4 presidential and legislative elections, many of which they describe as not having been made “legally” or “correctly.” This is, thus far, the greatest indictment of the TSE, which has come under fire in El Salvador dating back to their decision earlier this fall to accept the candidacy of Nayib Bukele for an unconstitutional presidential presidential reelection bid, but especially over the past ten days in the disastrous fallout from the presidential and legislative elections that were held on Sunday, February 4. Opposition parties and grassroots organizations are now decrying these elections as fraudulent at all levels. 

ELECTION DAY

On February 4, over 3.2 million Salvadorans – both in El Salvador and abroad, via electronic vote – participated in national elections for the presidency and Legislative Assembly. That night, the vast majority of the 8,620 voting tables across the country experienced failures as they attempted to submit their tally sheets (known as “actas”) via the technology provided by the TSE, resulting in only 70% of the presidential actas and 5% of the legislative actas being electronically submitted. This did not stop Nayib Bukele, running for an unconstitutional consecutive presidential term, from declaring himself the victor on Sunday night, thus usurping the role of the TSE, the body authorized to determine the results. Well before most voting centers had begun to count legislative ballots, Bukele announced that his party, Nuevas Ideas, had won “at least 58 out of 60” seats.

Due to their catastrophic failure to receive the actas and thus report preliminary results, the TSE announced two days later that they would do the final count ballot-by-ballot: first, of the unreported 30% of presidential ballots, and second, of 100% of legislative ballots. In the meantime, serious concerns emerged about the integrity of the ballots. Entire ballot boxes, such as all of those from San Salvador, the country’s largest department representing nearly a quarter of the legislature, went missing for 36 hours, and photographs circulated of ballot boxes in storage that were unsealed or damaged. The TSE’s failure to guarantee the due chain of custody severely undermined the legitimacy of the ensuing final count process.

PRESIDENTIAL RESULTS

Despite its initial commitment, the TSE soon changed course, announcing that they planned to count only 1.5% of presidential ballots by hand – only those ballot boxes where the total count was disputed; for the remainder of the presidential votes, actas, rather than the ballots themselves, would be reviewed.

According to TSE Election Day guidelines, actas are signed by citizen members of the voting tables as well as designated representatives of political parties and participating authorities, all of whom testify to the number of ballots each party or candidates received, in order to affirm or contrast the official numbers later reported by the TSE. However, the government’s suppression of opposition party participation from the process on Election Day, barring many trained and credential poll workers supplied by opposition political parties from staffing voting tables, often left only Nuevas Ideas representatives with copies that would have otherwise been distributed to every party.

As one CISPES elections observer present at the final count noted, “Several vote count tables cannot find the actas produced on election day. We are concerned with reports that, at times, it seems the only ones present who have this information are representatives from Nuevas Ideas.”

On February 8, the FMLN’s representative to the Electoral Oversight Board, Mirna Benavides, told the press that, “Suddenly, original actas started to appear. In some cases, the governing party [Nuevas Ideas] had them, also the Attorney General. Strangely enough, the administrative body overseeing the elections [the TSE] doesn’t have the actas.” A candidate from the opposing right-wing ARENA party described a similar scene at one table: “Only the governing Nuevas Ideas party had a copy with signatures, the Attorney General’s office, too. It seems impossible that only Nuevas Ideas has them, and that the Tribunal itself, which is the highest electoral authority, does not have an original signed copy. It doesn’t take much to see how the scales are tipped in this game.”

In the end, the TSE was able to produce less than 50% of the original tally sheets. But instead of opening ballot boxes to perform a recount, the TSE ordered poll workers to use the copies provided by the Office of the Attorney General in order to “speed up” the process (The AG was illegally appointed by the Bukele-dominated legislature on May 1, 2021). Ruth López of human rights organizations Cristosal denounced the TSE’s decision: “If there are no actas, open the boxes and count the ballots; there is no other choice.”

However, considering concerns that the ballots themselves may have been tampered with since Election Day, opposition parties and civil society organizations have expressed little confidence in the results, even if a ballot-by-ballot count had occurred.

The final presidential count concluded on February 9, with the TSE announcing that Bukele had won 82.66% of the vote. View final results here.

LEGISLATIVE RESULTS

On Sunday, February 11, the TSE moved its operations to the National Gym for the legislative ballot count. As the BBC reported, “For Bukele, maintaining [the majority he enjoyed in the last assembly] will be indispensable in order to, for example, continue extending the controversial State of Exception, in place already for nearly two years.”

The TSE originally stated it would perform a ballot-by-ballot recount of legislative votes. However, the Tribunal subsequently qualified its position, announcing it would review ballots without changing their preliminary classification from election night. This means that there is no opportunity, for example, to re-examine votes classified as “null” by poll workers on February 4th, or vice versa, to cast out a ballot that should not have been counted. Opposition parties have spoken out against this decision given that many of the poll workers they had provided on Election Day were blocked from staffing the voting tables, and uncredentialed individuals from the governing party took their places. “Who’s to say there aren’t valid votes for our parties sitting in the bag of annulled votes?” asked VAMOS candidate Claudia Ortiz. “We want the public to be able to see in this count which votes have been declared null.”

On Twitter, leftist FMLN legislator Anabel Belloso reiterated her party’s call for a ballot-by-ballot recount: “We demand that the TSE review every ballot, vote by vote. The system of filling out and submitting the actas failed, and the data [there] cannot be guaranteed without contrasting it to the ballots. [We call on the TSE to] not to continue endorsing #ElectoralFraud [but to] comply and enforce the law.”

The final count process for the legislature has been plagued by systemic irregularities. Government officials arrived with Nuevas Ideas party vests on and sporting party credentials supplied by Nuevas Ideas, despite constitutional prohibitions on public employees acting in the service of political parties. CISPES’ international observers corroborated reports from opposition parties and TSE magistrate Julio Olivo of an aggressive and disproportionate presence of Bukele’s Nuevas Ideas party representatives throughout the process, violating the equitable representation and participation by all parties enshrined in Salvadoran electoral law.

At least one opposition party, ARENA, has already withdrawn from the final count in protest.

In a letter to his TSE colleagues, which he published on X, magistrate Olivo, who previously reported receiving death threats for expressing dissenting opinions, wrote, “Based on article 209 of the Constitution of the Republic … the right to oversight by political parties should be widely guaranteed, given that the violation of this right could result in the very process being nullified.” He called on the TSE to issue clear guidance that all competing political parties have the right to provide oversight during the count and that each table where the count is being done may have only one vigilante [watcher] from each party “in order to avoid the overrepresentation of one party over another.”

On multiple occasions, international observers have witnessed Nuevas Ideas members dictating numbers to TSE workers who are entering the results of the ballot count into the system. Olivo raised a similar concern in his letter, noting “the presence of people outside the process who have been interfering with the count.” 

State media have been granted privileged access, while independent journalists have faced harassment and exclusion. As the process has progressed, credible images from international observers and independent journalists circulated of ballots being tallied that have no crease marks (voters must fold the large ballots twice, into quarters, in order to insert them into the ballot box) and ballots where a marker, as opposed to the crayon provided at the voting table, has clearly been used, fueling suspicions of ballot stuffing.

Olivo called on his colleagues at the TSE to “meet urgently to attend to the denunciations of manipulation of data and any form of interference or alteration being carried out by those in charge of entering the results, political party vigilantes, or others, determining responsibility in those cases where such actions are proven and identified.”

A COMPROMISED ELECTION

The Popular Resistance Bloc, a grassroots coalition of unions, student, rural organizations, and others, which has led mobilizations against government abuses over the past two years, called to nullify the February 4 elections and for new elections to be held under three conditions: First, that Bukele’s illegal candidacy be revoked; second, that sweeping reforms to limit representation of minority parties at the legislative and municipal levels be overturned; and third, that a new electoral authority made up by representatives proposed by civil society organizations oversee the new process. Barring those conditions, they called on all opposition parties to withdraw from the upcoming municipal elections on March 3rd in protest. 

According to CISPES, “It was clear from the beginning that the 2024 elections could be neither free nor fair given the level of political persecution, the suspension of basic rights under the State of Exception, and the TSE’s unwillingness to act as an independent counterweight to the Bukele regime, exemplified by allowing his illegal presidential candidacy to proceed. Unfortunately, our observations on election day and during the disastrous vote count to follow further bear this out. We call on organizations and governments around the world, including the Biden Administration, to speak out against the brazen fraud that Bukele’s party is currently committing in order to doctor the results of the February 4 legislative elections.”