Patience was wearing thin as ballots in Peru’s presidential election continued to trickle in on Wednesday, three days after a contest whose results remained too close to call. Front-runner Pedro Pablo Kuczynski’s running mate met Wednesday with electoral authorities to request they speed up the counting. Meanwhile, dozens of supporters of his rival Keiko Fujimori held a demonstration Tuesday night outside the electoral board to denounce what they said is fraud, even though neither the candidate nor her campaign have presented any evidence to back up their supporters’ claims. Electoral officials said they hope to wrap up their work on Thursday when the last ballots cast at embassies abroad arrive in Lima. But most experts said it’s already mathematically impossible for Fujimori to make up the 42,000 vote difference separating her from Kuczynski.
With 99 percent of polling stations counted, the former World Bank economist had 50.1 percent compared to the 49.9 percent for Fujimori, the daughter of imprisoned ex-president Alberto Fujimori.
Still, Fujimori has yet to concede defeat and her supporters are holding out hope for a turnaround. “She’s worked so hard crisscrossing the country,” said Lusa Maria Cuculiza, a congresswoman for Fujimori’s Popular Force party. “It would be unfair if she doesn’t win.”
Still being counted are the last ballots cast by an estimated 885,000 Peruvians eligible to vote abroad. Peruvians living outside the South American country, most of them in the United States, turned out massively for Fujimori in the 2011 election but with 90 percent of their vote already counted they appear to have favored Kuczynski this time around.
Full Article: Patience wears thin as Peru vote count drags on.