MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Peruvian prosecution to investigate Keiko Fujimori's alleged “disturbing of the vote”

Keiko Fujimori has vowed not to accept what she calls electoral fraud

Peru's State Attorney has announced conservative presidential candidate Keiko Fujimori is to be investigated for allegedly disturbing the electoral process through the filing of 760 requests for annulment of different polling stations after June 6's presidential runoff.

 As per the preliminary results and after more than a month, leftwing candidate Pedro Castillo appears to be the winner, although by a narrow margin.

Congresswoman Liliana Takayama, of Fujimori's Fuerza Popular (FP), is also under investigation, it was announced. Fujimori has other open cases for corruption and irregular financing of her campaign.

Fujimori and Takayama are suspected of “attacks against the right to vote, against the judicial function in the form of false declaration in administrative procedure and the modality of procedural fraud and public faith in the modality of generic falsehood,” it was reported.

The Prosecutor's Office was said to have detected 27 receipts for electoral tax rights that have been reused in different nullity proceedings. One of them was even photographed and edited with different image quality, “so they would have acted maliciously and reliably with the full purpose of misleading the electoral body.”

While Peruvians have been waiting for more than a month to officially find out who will be their new president, the electoral bodies are under siege by Fujimori, which seeks to have the ballot annulled and “new elections” be called.

Fujimori has asked interim President Francisco Sagasti on June 28 to request an “international audit” of the elections, but to no avail, because any irregularity regarding elections must be resolved by the National Elections Jury (JNE).

”He (Sagasti) fills his mouth saying that he is neutral, that he is impartial. President Sagasti, you had and still have the historic opportunity to become a president who defended democracy,” Fujimori was quoted as saying.

She has also announced she would not recognize Castillo's win if it comes to be proclaimed. “They say that in a few hours or days they will consummate the fraud … and we tell them that we are not going to accept it,” Fujimori said Saturday in Lima. “Throughout these weeks we have seen so many complaints of irregularities and they want to hurriedly launch a result,” added Fujimori, who claims that there was “fraud.”

The electoral body (ONPE) count, which reached 100% three weeks ago, gave Castillo 50.12% of the votes against 49.87% for Fujimori, but the final word must be given by the JNE once it decides upon the challenges filed by the right-wing candidate.

Meanwhile, Castillo is still waiting for the official announcement and while his teams are said to be working on the country's affairs, they have not yet been granted access to information from the ministries.

Sources close to Castillo have told the media, however, that as the JNE kept dismissing Fujimori's cases, the candidate was focusing on his planned future administration and the transition thereto.

Sagasti's government has extended the state of emergency due to pandemics throughout August. The previous resolution ended July 31, that is three days after the new president was sworn in. But now Sagasti has gone way beyond his own term in restricting citizen rights, “relating to personal liberty and security, the inviolability of the home and freedom of assembly and transit in the territory.” Since March 2020, a night curfew has been in force in Peru as a preventive measure to contain covid-19 infections.