"Two Votes Each?"... Election 'Inflation' Confusion in El Salvador

Naive Bukele President-Elect Likely to Secure Re-Election
Second Place Candidate's Vote Share Falls Below 7%

The presidential election in the Latin American country El Salvador proceeded amid confusion due to errors with the general election vote counting machines and servers. In this election, the re-election of President-elect Nayib Bukele (42) was virtually confirmed.

On the 5th (local time), the El Salvador Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE) website and local daily newspaper La Prensa Gr?fica reported that as of 3 p.m., 22 hours after the presidential vote, the counting rate was 70.25%. President Bukele's vote share stood at 83.13%, effectively confirming his re-election. The second-place candidate's vote share was reported to be below 7%.

President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador [Photo by APF Yonhap News]

The problem lies in the fact that serious errors occurred during the vote counting process in this election. Due to network disruptions and server issues, vote counting data from polling stations was not transmitted to the TSE. As a result, the official TSE website did not reflect the vote counting status in real time, and only 31% of the total votes were tallied, with the count stalled from 10 p.m. the previous day until early morning.

Local media also reported that some polling stations did not prepare the paper used to print vote tally results in advance, causing staff to wait for some time. In some polling stations, tally sheets with manually written vote counts were photographed and sent to the TSE. This has sparked controversy over whether the manually recorded vote counts can be trusted.

To make matters worse, allegations of vote count inflation were also raised. Local media reported, "In the case of the general election, there have been claims from various places that when entering data into the TSE system, one vote was recorded as two or three votes," adding, "Videos recording these error situations were even posted on social media."

Meanwhile, President-elect Bukele previously claimed on his X account, "According to our tally, we secured 58 out of 60 seats in the general election."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.