President Nayib Bukele in El Salvador heads for reelection despite vote tally delay

President Nayib Bukele appeared poised for reelection before the vote tally was stopped due to issues, as voters have resoundingly supported his crackdown on gangs despite concerns it's curtailed civil liberties.

SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador — Voters in El Salvador appeared to give Nayib Bukele a second term as president, but a troubled vote tally delayed results in an election that for many hinged on the tradeoff of curtailed civil liberties for security in a country once terrorized by gangs.

Problems with the vote count stalled the effort late Sunday with ballots from only 31% of polling places tallied, a percentage that remained stuck in place on the Supreme Electoral Tribunal’s preliminary results website Monday morning.

Early Monday, the electoral authority released a statement referring to “multiple actions that have hampered the development of the transmission activities of preliminary results” and the lack of the paper used to print out the vote tallies at polling places.

It called on the boards charged with tallying the votes at each polling place to switch to a contingency process that included tallying votes by hand, taking photographs or scans of those manual tallies and turning them into the Supreme Electoral Tribunal.

When the Supreme Electoral Tribunal’s digital tallied stopped late Sunday, Bukele had 83% of the vote, far ahead of his nearest competitor’s 7% for the leftist Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front. The electoral site updating the count crashed shortly before midnight.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/bukele-winning-reelection-el-salvador-rcna137249

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