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Peru The Electoral System
Suffrage was free, equal, secret, and obligatory for
all
those between the ages of eighteen and seventy. The right
to
participate in politics could only be taken away when one
was
sentenced to prison or given a sentence that stripped a
person of
his or her political rights. No political party was given
preference by the government, and free access to the
governmentowned mass media was given in proportion to the percentage
of
that party's results in the previous election. The
National
Elections Board, which was autonomous, was responsible for
electoral processes at the national and local levels.
National elections for the presidency and the Congress
were
held every five years. If no one presidential candidate
received
an absolute majority, the first- and second-place
candidates were
in a runoff election. The president could not be reelected
for a
consecutive term, but deputies and senators could be.
Direct municipal elections were held every three years.
Regional governments were elected every five years.
Elections of
regional governments were held in conjunction with either
the
December 1989 municipal or April 1990 national elections.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the electoral
process came
under substantial threat from the SL, which made the
sabotaging
of elections an explicit goal. Despite terrorist threats
in the
1990 presidential elections, voter turnout was higher than
in
1985, with the exception of some emergency zones in the
southern
Sierra, where the abstention rate was as high as 40
percent. Null
and blank voting was about 14.5 percent of the total in
the first
round in 1990 and 9.5 percent in the second (see
table 19,;
table 20, Appendix).
The threat from the SL was such that in some remote
rural
towns, there were no local officials at all, because
potential
candidates were not willing to jeopardize their lives in
order to
run for office. Although there was no doubt that the SL
failed to
jeopardize the 1990 elections, it managed to pose a
significant
threat to the process, particularly in remote rural areas.
Given
the severity and brutality of the SL's threat, it was
actually a
credit to the Peruvian electoral process that elections
were held
regularly and with such high voter-turnout ratios,
although fines
for not voting were also a factor.
Data as of September 1992
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