Peru’s tense presidential race has shifted to election courts, which will pore over hundreds of thousands of disputed ballots after Keiko Fujimori took the lead by a few thousand votes.
As many as 400,000 votes have been flagged, mostly for minor inconsistencies from illegible handwriting to missing signatures or stains. Most are from Lima, the capital, neighboring Callao and overseas where Fujimori, a market-friendly, tough-on-crime conservative, is ahead with more than 60% support.
Fujimori led leftist Roberto Sánchez by 4,500 votes in a country of 34 million people, with 98.3% of ballots from their June 7 runoff counted, according to an updated tally on Saturday.
“We already know what the result is going to be for those,” Fernando Tuesta, former head of the National Office of Electoral Processes. “It’s very difficult for Sánchez to overturn it, very, very difficult.”
Electoral authorities expect to announce the final count by mid-July.
Markets are betting on a Fujimori win. The Peruvian sol weakened when Sánchez’s showing initially came in stronger than expected, but rebounded as overseas votes favoring Fujimori began to arrive.
“Markets stabilized as it became evident that a deadlocked onshore vote would ultimately be tipped in Fujimori’s favor by traditionally right-leaning offshore voters,” said Thierry Larose, an emerging-markets portfolio manager at Vontobel Asset Management.
Electoral authorities are also reviewing requests from both parties to cancel thousands of votes over alleged irregularities, though international observers have dismissed those.
“The parties will continue using every legal avenue available,” Tuesta said.
A similar legal battle unfolded in Peru’s 2021 presidential election, when Fujimori lost to former President Pedro Castillo by just 44,000 votes. Her party then sought without much success to invalidate roughly 200,000 ballots. This time, Fujimori’s Popular Force party has requested the annulment of seven tally sheets in the southern Andes region, where she is trailing by a wide margin.
Sánchez has sought to annul more than 600 tally sheets from voters in the US and asked supporters for donations to fund additional requests in Lima, after electoral authorities had rejected his party’s bid to invalidate more than 1,700 tallies in the capital.
Such requests rarely succeed because they usually lack substance, said Omar Awapara, general secretary of local election-monitoring group Transparencia. Some claim delays in the transportation of election materials, others that party observers were unable to enter polling stations.
Lima’s city government, under the ultraconservative party of former presidential candidate Rafael López Aliaga, said it is preparing for potential demonstrations by Sánchez supporters in the coming days.
Sanchez has suggested that he and Fujimori jointly request a full recount.
“Our people are watching closely,” Sánchez wrote on X . “The vote and democracy must be respected.”