Four days after El Salvador’s legislative and mayoral elections, voters in the Central American country are still waiting for results as officials allege that the process of transmitting the votes electronically was sabotaged. Julio Olivo, the head of the country’s elections tribunal, said on Thursday that the Attorney General’s office will investigate failures of an electronic system that prevented officials from disclosing preliminary results on Sunday after polls closed. He said Soluciones Aplicativas S.A, a company hired to scan and disclose voting ballots, “could be extracting information and even changing certain things. There was sabotage in the process of transmitting data,” Olivo said on Wednesday. “We are going to prove it in the courts and a bunch of people are going to fall.”
Soluciones Aplicativas director Benjamin Zepeda, in an interview published Thursday in newspaper El Faro, said that his company was in charge of digitizing voting records and was not responsible for electronically publishing the data. He said observers from the Organization of American States oversaw the company’s work. He said the company “fulfilled its contract,” adding that elections officials gave the company little time to successfully implement the system.
Manual Count
El Salvadoran officials said they would began a hand count of votes as President Salvador Sanchez Ceren seeks to retain control of congress and his economic agenda, one year after taking office. All 84 seats in the national legislature were up for grabs in the election.
Full Article: Sabotage Alleged as El Salvador Vote Count Enters Fifth Day – Bloomberg Business.
