Fujimori and Sánchez in a technical tie! No Winner Yet!
Fujimori trails Sánchez by a slim margin with a partial count!
Lima, Jun 7 (EFE).-
Right-wing candidate Keiko Fujimori said Sunday she will respect the results of Peru’s presidential election after early vote counts showed her narrowly trailing leftist rival Roberto Sánchez, though she warned that “the days ahead will be long” until the final outcome is known.
“We are facing a technical tie. At this point, there is no winner in this race. For that reason, the days ahead will be long until we know the result. It would be irresponsible to define the outcome based on a sample such as the quick count, which uses about 1,000 tally sheets out of the 90,000 nationwide,” Fujimori said in a brief statement.
Projections by Ipsos Peru put Fujimori at 49.7% compared with Sánchez’s 50.3%. She said she would respect the election results once the official count reaches 100% and urged Sánchez to do the same.
“I want to tell the Peruvian people not to lose hope. We need calm and serenity, and we will wait with great faith for the final result,” Fujimori said, speaking to applause from members of her party, Fuerza Popular.
She also reiterated that the work of her party’s observers — which she said number about 95,000 — is “doubly important,” as they must review the tally sheets one by one to uphold the “will of the people.”
In the 2021 election, Fujimori refused to accept the results that declared former President Pedro Castillo the winner by about 40,000 votes. She alleged fraud without solid evidence and sought to annul thousands of ballots in an attempt to overturn the outcome.
On Sunday, another official sample of tally sheets conducted by pollster Datum, with a margin of error of 1.9%, put Sánchez at 50.14% and Fujimori at 49.86%.
Those projections confirm that the contest between Fujimori and Sánchez is likely to be decided by a razor-thin margin, similar to the previous two elections, both of which were settled by differences of about 40,000 votes. EFE
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