The Court ordered that a new hearing be held to review the contested records within a period of no more than five days. After the review, the results must be compared with the minutes that were part of the process to find out if they are the same ones that were uploaded to the counting system.
The Court said that if necessary, a new count of the contested votes would be carried out.
The political parties that requested the amparo argued in their petition that there is a “flagrant threat to the exercise of representative democracy derived from a procedure for generating results of the manifestation of citizen will that was altered,” they said.
The constitutional lawyer Alejandro Balsells said that, worldwide, “The guarantee of the electoral process is not to recount the votes, because that is what the vote-receiving boards are for, electoral bodies that are temporarily formed and are the only ones competent to count the votes.” ballot papers”.
The decision of the Court means that for the moment the results of the elections in which the president, vice president, municipal mayors, deputies to Congress and deputies to the Central American Parliament were elected have not been made official.
In the presidential election, no candidate reached 50% of the necessary votes to declare himself the winner. The recount of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal placed the candidates Sandra Torres and Bernardo Arévalo in first and second place, who will face each other in a second round of voting, scheduled for August 20.
“The Electoral Tribunal must suspend the qualification and officialization of results so that, by the date scheduled for the second round for the presidential election, everything has been duly cleared up,” the Court said in a statement.
Among the parties that presented the amparo and that did not reach more than 8% of the preference are some of the favorites in the polls, such as Edmond Mulet for the Cabal party, the ruling party Manuel Conde, Zury Ríos — daughter of former dictator Efraín Ríos Montt, indicted for genocide — from the Valor-Unionista coalition. Torres’s party also requested a review of the votes.
Some have expressed fear that the timing and results of the electoral process will be revealed, which would open the door to extend the term of current President Alejandro Giammattei. The CC, for its part, said that the ruling must be complied with within the aforementioned deadlines to “guarantee alternability in the exercise of power… extremes that under no circumstances should be questioned or modified.”
The Constitution establishes in its article 184 that the post of president and vice president will be held for a “non-extendable period” of four years.
Dozens of people demonstrated on Saturday afternoon and night in front of the Constitutional Court with slogans such as “My vote is respected, at the polls, not in the courts.”
Arévalo accompanied the protest and said that his party “together with the people, we are not going to allow the will of the people of Guatemala to be cheated.”
He said that they would request that the Electoral Tribunal order the decision to be revoked for being “dangerous for the integrity of the electoral process and very dangerous for a democracy that is being increasingly corroded by perverse uses of legal trickery.”
The Rafael Landívar Jesuit University said in a press release that “The will of the citizens was expressed on June 25 despite the disenchantment, uncertainty and anxiety that prevailed in the months prior to the event.”
FUENTE: Associated Press
