Peru’s presidential candidate Roberto Sánchez announced this Saturday that he would request the annulment of the votes of Peruvians abroad, which would give him the victory, as he has been the most voted in the national territory.

[Keiko Fujimori Rejects Total Vote Recount in Tight Peruvian Election: Presidential Candidate Sánchez Will Request To Cancel Peruvians Abroad Votes](https://www.telesurenglish.net/presidential-candidate-sanchez-will-request-to-cancel-peruvians-abroad-votes/)

In a press conference with foreign correspondents, Sánchez anticipated this recourse after the electoral authorities rejected a first appeal to annul the votes from more than 1,700 polling stations from the election on June 7.

With 99.64% of the votes counted, Fujimori has 50.11% of the valid votes compared to Sánchez’s 49.88%, a difference of 41,633 votes between them, but the percentages are reversed if the votes from abroad are subtracted, so Sánchez achieves 50.11% of the valid votes with 39,614 more than Fujimori, who registers 49.89%.

The leader of the Juntos por el Perú party, who ran on behalf of the imprisoned former president Pedro Castillo (2021-2022), argued his intention to annul the voting abroad, where some 300,000 Peruvians voted, due to alleged irregularities in the chain of custody of the ballot boxes, after the authorities decided that the results would no longer be transmitted digitally, but that the ballot boxes had to arrive in Lima to be counted.

“That vote of Peruvians abroad, which is worth the same as Peruvians in our territory, has been affected by this regulatory change,” at the alleged request of the Foreign Ministry, Sánchez indicated.

Neither Sánchez nor his party criticized before the vote the decision of the authorities not to digitally send the results of the ballot boxes abroad and to wait for them to arrive in Lima to be scrutinized, a change about which the main international electoral observation missions have not seen a serious irregularity or a sign of fraud.

However, Sánchez assured that there were ballot boxes that traveled in diplomatic pouches without due custody, such as those from Argentina, which were the last to arrive in Lima for their official count, and which, according to the candidate, did so as consolidated air cargo, in “exposed bundles, without the diplomatic pouch procedure.”

“These facts for us have seriously affected the intangibility and legal security (of the elections), especially when after the electoral process the ballot boxes from Oceania arrived the next day and Argentina arrived on the last day of the legal deadline,” he noted.

Sánchez added that, until now, the electoral authorities have not been able to explain the reasons for that change so that the ballot boxes were not digitized from their place of origin.

“We believe that they have affected the chain of custody, the security of the vote and the ballot box” and that it is “unprecedented that more than 160 consuls from around the world come to Peru to bring the physical ballot box” from the second round vote.

Regarding the decision of the National Electoral Jury (JNE) to reject the appeals presented by his party against nearly 2,000 ballot boxes, Sánchez said that they have not yet been notified of the resolution and criticized that electoral justice is regulated by the economic collection of fees, which they were unable to pay for this appeal.

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