NEWS ANALYSIS : Salvador’s Election Unveils Future Woes : Politics: The ruling party’s victory is overshadowed by the fact that thousands were prevented from voting.

The first elections here since the end of a brutal civil war were meant to be an important test of El Salvador’s struggle to recover from more than a decade of bloodshed and division.

Yet serious irregularities that prevented tens of thousands of people from voting showed that El Salvador, despite two years of U.N. tutelage, is still a long way from building a real democracy. Last Sunday’s flawed elections also raised questions about the future of the peace process.

“Salvadorans trusted that the international community was going to guarantee the rules,” said political scientist Hector Dada, who heads a liberal think tank. “The lesson was that without a (strong) civil society, you cannot have free, democratic elections. These elections laid bare the real problem: You have to build democratic structures in order to guarantee elections.”

The ruling right-wing party rolled to victory in elections in which nearly half the registered electorate did not, or could not, vote. Because right-wing presidential candidate Armando Calderon Sol fell shy of an absolute majority, however, he was forced into a runoff with Ruben Zamora, a leftist legislator who heads a coalition that includes former guerrillas who waged war against a string of U.S.-backed governments.

The presidential race is almost a moot point. Zamora is not expected to be able to overcome Calderon Sol’s sizable lead. Still at issue, however, are legislative and local posts that will determine the balance of power in postwar El Salvador. It is at this crucial level, where a small number of votes can change the outcome, that the voting irregularities may have had the greatest impact.

The left is challenging results in 37 of El Salvador’s 262 municipalities, and three seats in the 84-member national legislature are also being disputed, according to Joaquin Villalobos, former commander of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, the guerrilla army that became a political party under U.N.-brokered peace accords that ended the war in 1992.

Those three seats in the legislature will determine whether the ruling Nationalist Republican Alliance, or Arena, has majority control or whether the opposition will have enough votes to block unwanted legislation and influence the choice of a new Supreme Court.

Arena and its allies controlled the National Assembly during the term of outgoing President Alfredo Cristiani and were able to approve such controversial laws as a 1992 amnesty pardoning war criminals.

The opposition fears that an Arena-dominated legislature would roll back some of the reforms enacted as part of the peace accords, such as the formation of a civilian police force. Calderon Sol has said he supports the peace process but does not agree with all of the reforms.

Dada, the political scientist, said the perception of election fraud discourages people who are only gradually being incorporated into a democratic system.

“People value democracy more if they have elected their closest leader, the one they can see and greet on the street,” Dada said. “People have the idea these elections were not clean, and that does not help build democracy.”

On Election Day, thousands of people with valid voter cards were turned away from the polls because their names had been omitted from registry lists. Tens of thousands more never received their cards despite having completed the paperwork in time.

A decision by the official Supreme Electoral Tribunal to concentrate voting stations in a handful of locations meant inordinately long lines and forced some voters to travel across town or for miles over country roads to their designated ballot boxes.

The irregularities alone do not account for the losses suffered by the former guerrillas in their first foray into mainstream politics. The left overestimated its strength in some areas, and some citizens may have been casting their vote to punish the guerrillas for their role in the war’s destruction. And many voters clearly favored the image of stability that Arena sought to project.

Yet some of the worst irregularities were reported in areas of traditional leftist support, such as Morazan, Chalatenango and Soyapango.

Zamora said that despite the widespread irregularities he will participate in the runoff, which will probably take place April 24. But he said he was disturbed by the flaws and insisted that steps be taken to correct them.

“I do not want to use the word fraud , because fraud would imply having to withdraw from the electoral system,” Zamora told a news conference late last week. “(But) we cannot accept that more than 45% of the people do not vote, and they don’t vote because the system rejects them.”

Some veteran observers of Salvadoran elections, such as British scholar David Browning, are skeptical that changes will be made in the next month, especially because many of the same problems were noted in 1991 legislative elections and never corrected.

Most observers and resident diplomats reserved the most harsh criticism for the Supreme Electoral Tribunal. Although opposition parties have representatives on the tribunal, it is dominated by magistrates who support Arena.

The tribunal was repeatedly accused of violating the election code it was appointed to uphold, and diplomats said it routinely ignored advice from U.N. observers assigned to monitor the elections.

Under the law, the tribunal was supposed to appoint an auditor to monitor the millions of dollars donated by the United States, Europe and the United Nations for the elections. The tribunal never appointed an auditor, saying it could not find a firm willing to do the job.