Balaguer Holds Slim Election Lead : Dominican Republic: His race with Juan Bosch is so close it can still go either way, the pollsters contend.

Blind, 83-year-old President Joaquin Balaguer held a narrow lead late Thursday over his 80-year-old rival, Juan Bosch, but private pollsters cautioned that the vote was so close it could go either way by this morning.

With more than half of the country’s 7,000 polling places reporting, the independent Central Electoral Board said Balaguer was leading with 386,766 votes--or 34.9%--to Bosch’s 375,869--or 33.9%. Third-ranking candidate Jose Francisco Pena Gomez, 53, had 256,243 while five minor candidates trailed far behind.

The slender difference, which shifted between the two old rivals throughout a tediously slow day of poll reporting, was particularly upsetting to Bosch partisans who went into Wednesday’s election believing their candidate to be a 10-point favorite.

On Thursday morning, Bosch headquarters said its computer projections put the one-time Marxist president comfortably ahead. But by late afternoon, an apparently agitated Bosch, complaining that he is old and has nothing to lose, threatened during a press conference to call his supporters into the streets in protest if the vote count does not turn in his favor.

“We’re heading into a political crisis,” warned his spokesman, Lionel Fernandez, who charged that the national electoral board’s slow official count of the votes was being “manipulated” to favor Balaguer.

“We hope that this can have a democratic solution, otherwise we could have a major confrontation,” he said, raising fears that violence could conclude what so far has been the most peaceful election here in 25 years.

Even before Bosch’s complaint, the electoral board, which has temporary control of the nation’s radio and television broadcasting outlets until the vote counting process is finished, announced a complete ban on public demonstrations.

About two-thirds of the country’s 3.2-million registered voters participated in the Wednesday election. International observers, including former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and his wife Rosalynn, found few faults in the voting or the count.

“The elections have been carried out adequately and honestly,” said Carter in a televised statement from the electoral board’s headquarters where he monitored the vote count. Carter said the slowdown in counting was caused in part by a technically flawed code in the board’s computer but that it had been corrected.

Mark Penn, of the private New York polling firm Penn and Schoen, also projected a narrow Balaguer victory after analyzing a scientifically selected nationwide sampling of polling place results. Penn gave Balaguer an edge of 34.4% to 34% for Bosch, but said “it is still too close to call.” The election will be decided by plurality, with no run-off.

The New York pollster, who has worked in previous Dominican and other Latin American elections, said: “Either way, when the final results are in they should be considered legitimate. We are seeing a genuinely close election.”

Penn’s firm was employed by Pena Gomez’s Dominican Revolutionary Party to project and analyze election results. Although he had little hope of winning, Pena Gomez appeared elated over his strong showing.