Paraguay closes polling stations after electing municipal offices

The polling stations closed their doors this Sunday in Paraguay after ten hours of a suffrage to which more than four million people were summoned to elect the mayors and councilors of the districts of the South American country.

The Electoral Justice informed that the participation would have exceeded 50%, in the absence of having all the data.

“We can assure that 100% of the tables have been enabled, in 1,135 polling stations. We are convinced that this event has exceeded 50% participation. We rate citizen participation as positive, “said the Director of Electoral Resources, Luis Salas.

After the scrutiny, the data will begin to be sent to the Preliminary Election Results Transmission System (TREP), which will be disclosed in real time by the organism’s social networks.

In this regard, Fausto Von Streber, Director of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), stressed that the TREP is preliminary, informal and non-binding, although its “Margin of error is practically nil with the computation in a single instance”.

The municipal elections, which were scheduled for last year and were postponed due to the pandemic, are the first in Paraguay with unlocked lists and electronic voting machines.

The process was attended by several observation missions, one of them that of the Organization of American States (OAS), which will draw up the corresponding recommendations.

The ruling Colorado Party and the Liberal Party, the largest in the opposition, are the formations with the most candidates for the positions that would be elected: 831 for mayors and 15,535 for councilors.

In the campaign there have been several acts of violence, with the murder of three candidates for municipal office, one of them Colorado.

The results of the elections are seen as the beginning of the strategies of the political formations to forge lists and alliances for 2023, when the presidential and legislative elections are held.

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