As Lima’s mayoral election comes down to the wire, only 7,844 votes separated Susana Villarán and Lourdes Flores early Friday, with 86.8 percent of the valid ballots counted, Daily El Comercio reports.
Villarán, the liberal Social Force Party candidate, had 38.2 percent of the valid votes, or 1,534,846 ballots cast, while the conservative Popular Christian Party candidate, Flores, had 38 percent, with 1,527,002 votes.
Villarán’s advantage over Flores slipped significantly during the early morning hours on Friday, from a difference of 21,430 votes to just 7,844, according to the latest report from the ONPE, from 7:40 a.m.
Susana Villarán’s razor thin lead over her conservative opponent Lourdes Flores for the mayor of Lima has just got narrower, according to an updated count of ballots by Peru’s National Office of Electoral Processes (ONPE).
With 82.88 percent of the votes counted, Villarán, of the leftist Social Force Party, has less than a half percent lead over Flores, of the Popular Christian Party, daily El Comercio reported.
According to the results, Villarán has 38.33 percent support, compared to 37.84 percent for Flores, a difference of only 18,964 votes.
Since the election on October 3, Villarán has maintained a narrow lead over Flores that has fluctuated between 1-2 percent of the votes counted. On Wednesday, that lead decreased to 0.49 percent.
The announcement of a winner for Lima’s mayor could be made next week, the head of the National Election Board, Hugo Sivina, said previously.
The delay is due to irregularities in an unusually high number of ballot tally sheets. Half of the 8,384 cases were officially attributed to tally sheets lacking the mandatory signatures and fingerprints of citizen poll workers.
