This month, incumbent Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele seemed poised to easily win reelection and sweep the legislature with his New Ideas party. But when his legislative supermajority appeared in doubt, Bukele and his supporters resorted to outright fraud.

F | ebruary 4 was supposed to be Nayib Bukele’s coronation day. Having successfully rigged the electoral system in his favor, suppressed the political opposition, and won over much of the population through an apparent victory over El Salvador’s notorious criminal gangs, the millennial millionaire and publicist president was poised to easily secure a second term — constitutional prohibitions on reelection be damned — and sweep the legislature with his New Ideas (NI) party.

By most accounts, that’s exactly what happened. A little under 53 percent of Salvadorans went to the polls that Sunday, and the vast majority of them voted for Bukele. Most of those voters — though not, it appears, as many as the president had hoped — also cast ballots for NI legislators.

But something went wrong. As poll workers began to input their tallies, the platform for uploading preliminary results on election night crashed. With only 70 percent of presidential votes and 5 percent of legislative results registered, the national elections board (the Supreme Electoral Tribunal, or TSE) declared the preliminary count a failure.

In the contentious recount that followed, credible allegations of fraud mounted. Bukele and his party appeared to be stealing an election that, by most measures, they had already won.

read more: https://jacobin.com/2024/02/nayib-bukele-el-salvador-election-fraud/