Costa Rica Blogs - Newsfeeds

As of today, the TSE can announce the next President of Costa Rica.  But we are still not sure when that will be.  The time permitted for appeal the manual scrutiny of the final polling stations has expired.  The TSE has 695 appeals in total to resolve, and currently 210 of those are pending.  Once this task is finished, the TSE may announce the winner officially.

Most presidential candidates have not waited for the initial announcement and have visited the Oscar Arias residence in Rohrmoser to congralute the PLN candidate.  The latest was Antonio Alvarez Desantí, who broke from PLN to form his own party when Arias announced that he was running.  Alvarez did not rule out a return to PLN in 2010 from his own party, but did confirm he would run in either case.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the TSE has denied most appeals by PAC to rescrutinize polling stations.  While some have qualified PAC candidate Solís as a sore loser, for the “excessive” appeals, magistrates did find 3000 of the alleged 3900 ballots that PAC qualified as missing according to their observers and TSE statistics.  TSE officials had denied that 5000 ballots were missing when the accusation came to light, but the missing ballots were in bags holding votes for legislator and were discovered during the scrutiny of these ballots.  8 of the missing voter rolls were also found in these bags.

While most of the appeals have been rejected, some have been passed along to the Electoral Inspection oversight board. There it will be determined whether or not tampering was involved, and whether or not criminal charges may be filed.  If election crimes have occured, the cases will be passed to the Public Ministry for action.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 28th, 2006 at 6:11 pm and is filed under Election 2006. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.