Leftist Party Expands Election Fraud Allegations in El Salvador

Leftist former guerrillas on Wednesday expanded their allegations of fraud stemming from last Sunday’s elections, focusing now on a clumsy and unusually slow vote count that they claim is being distorted.

Ballots have been voided during the count, monitors’ access to the tallies has been restricted and ballot boxes have apparently been stuffed, members of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) claimed as election authorities continued to delay release of official results.

Other opposition parties--including an up-and-coming evangelical party--joined in many of the complaints, demanding closer scrutiny of the vote count.

Preliminary results have given the lead in the presidential race to the government’s right-wing party. But a runoff with the left will be held next month because no candidate has received more than 50% of the vote.

At stake still are legislative seats, which are distributed based on percentages of votes and will determine whether the left is an effective opposition force or whether ruling conservatives have free rein.

Election authorities, already the target of harsh criticism because of the chaotic way in which they handled El Salvador’s first postwar elections, abruptly cut off access to computerized tabulations of the vote on Wednesday.

That action further raised suspicions about whether the process is aboveboard.

Although final results have not been released, the two top vote-getters, Armando Calderon Sol of the ruling Nationalist Republican Alliance (Arena) and Ruben Zamora, who heads a coalition that includes the FMLN, were summoned before the official Supreme Electoral Tribunal on Wednesday to begin planning the runoff. Both candidates demanded that the irregularities that tarnished Sunday’s voting be corrected.

Gerson Martinez, a senior political strategist for the FMLN, said initial tabulations of the vote showed that many ballot boxes contained more votes than is legally possible.

Under the awkward Salvadoran system, no more than 400 voters can be assigned to each ballot box. Yet several boxes from the La Libertad and Usulutan departments had two and three times that number, Martinez said.

In San Miguel, one of El Salvador’s largest cities, the left claimed that a group of Arena hard-liners absconded with 15 ballot boxes. And in a private school in the capital, 100 envelopes full of votes never delivered were discovered, a government prosecutor said.

Arena spokesmen dismissed the problems and claimed the FMLN is looking for “ghosts” to compensate for its electoral losses.

The election was the first since U.N.-brokered peace accords ended El Salvador’s 12-year civil war in 1992. Preliminary results have given Calderon Sol around 49% of the vote, with about 25.5% going to Zamora.