El Salvador Presidential Elections 2014 Results: Electoral Council Says Race Is Still Too Close To Call

BBC reports that El Salvador’s electoral council said on Sunday night that with 99.9 percent of the votes tallied up, the winner of presidential elections was still too close to call. “The process is going to do a definitive recount of the votes which have already been announced, but 10 polling stations still haven’t reported yet,” said Eugenio Chicas, the electoral council’s president, in a radio and TV broadcast. Chicas added that as of the time being, leftist candidate Salvador Sánchez Cerén of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) had gotten 50.11 percent of the votes, while the conservative Norman Quijano of the National Republican Alliance (ARENA) had won 49.89 percent – a difference of 6,367 votes.

Both candidates have claimed victory. Sánchez Cerén, a guerrilla fighter during the 12-year civil war that ended in 1992 was the favorite going into the second round of elections after having garnered 55 percent of the public’s support during the first round. He spoke as if certain he were the winner in a speech on Sunday night. “My government is going to seek understanding with the workers,” he said, “we’re going to seek understanding with the businessmen, because together government, business, and people can make great changes.”

He also rejected allegations of fraud made by Quijano, who the Associated Press described as calling on the army to play a role in ensuring fairness in the final results, saying that “the armed forces are ready to make democracy” and criticizing the electoral council for having “sold out to the dictatorship”. Much of Quijano’s surge to close the difference in polls after the first round of voting, the AP notes, may have to do with the conservative candidate’s recent campaign of references to violent protests in leftist-run Venezuela, whose government is allied with the FMLN. "We are not going to allow Venezuelan-style fraud, in the style of [Hugo] Chávez and [Nicolás] Maduro,” he said. "We have our own recount, which shows we won."