Nevertheless, there is also a consensus among experts that moderates will likely dominate the new Congress. That said, the bar could hardly be lower, given that his predecessors include one former president serving a year jail term for corruption and human rights abuses, and four others allegedly caught up in the Odebrecht scandal.
Measures to look out for include: curbing the parliamentary immunity that has frequently allowed lawmakers to get away with flagrant crimes; a restoration of a senate, which could check the worst excesses of the current single-chamber legislature; and public funding of political parties to stop the epidemic of illicit donations, often from big business and in some cases organized crime. If the new Congress is popular with the public, it could help Peru avoid the emergence of an anti-establishment dark horse presidential candidate in Tegel is an independent journalist and analyst based in Lima.
You can follow him on Twitter at SimeonTegel. Search for:. An unenthusiastic public A total of 21 parties are running in the elections, with none consistently receiving double-digit support from voters. Early reports in the April 8 election revealed that there were only two challenged or disputed ballots out of every 10, counted. Official returns from the individual voting places are delivered by hand to 57 counting centers, where they are entered on computers and then transmitted to central election headquarters in Lima.
A small group of distinguished jurists,with constitutional authority, makes final decisions over the entire procedure and resolves any possible disputes. As is well known, few of these constraints or guarantees exist in the United States.
Our voters' lists have no guarantee of being either current or accurate. Instead of an authoritative and trusted governing body supervising a standard system, we have at least 50 separate state procedures and, it might be said, almost 4, independent county organizations.
As we have seen in Florida and some other states, procedures and ballots vary from one precinct to another, and the expected error rate in some jurisdictions is as high as 3 percent of the total. One other significant difference between our two countries is that almost all other democracies require that, in exchange for the use of free airwaves, television networks offer 10 free minutes a day to each politically viable presidential candidate, who can purchase additional advertising if desired.
With one exception, American networks refused an appeal last year to contribute just five minutes a day for all candidates combined, and their gross overcharging for political commercials is one cause of such expensive elections. Although America's historic commitment to democracy counteracts some of the obvious deficiencies in our electoral process, we could learn from the experiences of other countries such as Peru, Mexico and Brazil.
As the greatest democracy on Earth, we must take every opportunity to ensure that our electoral process continues to keep pace with modern technology, while adhering to our historic democratic ideals.
Please sign up below for important news about the work of The Carter Center and special event invitations. Peace Partners. Multimedia Videos Photo Gallery. The reasons are diverse, from a lack of signatures to arithmetic mistakes to doubts about whether a vote was properly marked in a ballot.
How many contested votes are at stake? About , potential ballots are at stake, Reuters calculated, assuming standard absenteeism patterns. Some votes will be voided - voting is mandatory in Peru, so people who don't want to pay a fine but also don't want to vote sometimes draw doodles or leave the ballot blank. Allowing for likely voided votes brings that number down to , Could the contested votes swing the vote? Anything can happen.
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