Peru's presidential election count is advancing slowly and without a clear resolution, with right-wing candidate Keiko Fujimori — daughter of jailed former authoritarian president Alberto Fujimori — holding first place with around 17% of the vote. With 72% of ballots officially processed early Tuesday by the National Office of Electoral Processes (ONPE, Peru's electoral authority), three candidates are locked in an extremely tight contest for the second spot in the June 7 runoff: Rafael López Aliaga, the former mayor of Lima running on a hard-right platform, stood at 13%; Jorge Nieto, a liberal former culture minister, at 12%; and leftist Roberto Sánchez at just under 10%. As votes from Peru's interior regions continue to flow in, those figures are shifting significantly.
A comprehensive quick count conducted by polling firm Ipsos and civic watchdog Transparencia, based on a representative sample of 95.7% of tallies, painted an even tighter picture: Fujimori at 17.1%, with Sánchez (12.4%), López Aliaga (11.3%) and Nieto (10.7%) in a statistical three-way tie. Álvaro Henzler, president of Transparencia, said it was simply "not possible to determine" which candidate would qualify for the runoff and urged voters to wait calmly for the official results. The discrepancy between the ONPE count and the quick count reflects a geographic bias in vote processing: López Aliaga drew strong support in Lima but only around 7% in the rest of the country, while Sánchez registered just 3% in the capital but 17% across the regions — and those regional ballots are the last to be counted.
The election was also marred by serious logistical failures. A contractor hired to distribute ballot materials failed to deliver them to polling stations across Lima, leaving more than 52,000 voters unable to cast ballots on election day. Peru's National Elections Jury (JNE) filed a criminal complaint against ONPE's director, Piero Corvetto, and three other officials for alleged obstruction and delay of the electoral process. A police anti-corruption unit raided ONPE's offices, and one senior electoral official was detained on suspicion of collusion in the hiring of the contractor. The affected polling stations were kept open the following Monday — an unprecedented move in Peruvian electoral history — though critics noted that voters cast ballots while preliminary results were already being publicly reported, potentially influencing their choices.
The EU election observation mission, led by Annalisa Corrado, characterised the problems as "delays" rather than deliberate manipulation, saying the 150 deployed monitors had found no evidence of targeted fraud. López Aliaga, however, alleged irregularities on social media as early as Sunday morning and called his supporters to protest outside the electoral tribunal that evening. The delays are not entirely unprecedented — in 2016 ONPE took ten days to process 100% of ballots — but the scale of this election added complexity: five simultaneous votes on a single five-section ballot, with 35 presidential candidates. Only 55% of the 460,000 poll workers had been trained two days before the election.
The stakes of the second-place contest are high. In 2021, leftist Pedro Castillo beat Fujimori in the runoff by just 44,000 votes out of some 18 million cast — a margin that underscores how consequential even tens of thousands of uncounted ballots can be. Final results are expected to take several days, and Peru's history of prolonged post-election disputes means the country is bracing for a tense wait.