Although three weeks have passed since the general elections of October 22, the definitions in some municipalities only arrived in the last hours. In addition to the disputed mayor of La Plata -with the opening of polls included- this Wednesday night Three other results that were pending review were closed.
The judges that make up the National Electoral Board for the province of Buenos Aires Roberto Lemos Arias, Sergio Torres and Alejo Ramos Padilla, This Wednesday night they rejected the requests to open 37 polls from Pinamar, 25 de Mayo and General Alvear made by Union for the Homeland since they did not find inconsistencies in the minutes and certificates of scrutiny. In all three municipalities he won Together for Change.
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Prior to the decision of the Electoral Board, the representatives of UxP They insisted with the request to open 37 ballot boxes and JxC gave up on 10 and maintained the request that a ballot box be opened on May 25. Peronism based most of its requests on the fact that they altered “the trend” of votes that they had obtained in other tables in that municipality. Together for Change opposed and pointed out that the number of openings claimed was very high in proportion to the total number of ballot boxes in the district.
The debate between Julio Garro and Julio Alak in La Plata prior to the general elections (Photo: Impulso Baires).
The court indicated that when examining the guidelines for opening the polls, the Board analyzed the case of the elections in La Plata, in which the political strength of the candidate who had come in first place in the provisional count, Unión por la Patria, did not present opposition to the opening of 79 polls carried out by the opposition force, represented by the current mayor – who was running for re-election, Julio Garro.
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However, in Pinamar, General Alvear and 25 de Mayo, Together for Change – which had won in the provisional scrutiny by very little – did not accept the opening of polls that Unión por la Patria intended. For this reason, the Electoral Board analyzed the scrutiny records of those tables without detecting obvious errors or differences with the certificates of the party prosecutors that justify the opening of the polls.
After the refusal to open the polls, Juan Ibarguren was ratified as the elected mayor of Pinamar and JxC maintains the mayorship. (Photo: @JuanIbarguren)
Finally, he concluded that it is “inadmissible to grant the request to open the polls in the face of scrutiny records about which there are no doubts and they have not even been questioned» and highlighted that «only in cases in which obvious defects are found in the records, the polls are opened in order to reconstruct the results of the voting table and avoid declaring their nullity.» ; with the objective of preserving the will of the hundreds of voters who cast their vote there.”
So, J.together for Change maintains the mayor of Pinamar, which will be in the hands of Juan Ibarguren as of December 10, replacing Martín Yeza, who was elected national deputy and was not going for another term. Meanwhile, on May 25, the victory of Ramiro Egüen (JxC) over the current mayor of Unión por la Patria, Hernán Ralinqueo, was confirmed.
They were thus ratified two defeats for UxP, who loses the chance to take power in a key municipality in the fifth electoral section and, at the same time, is left without control of a district. In General Alvear the opposition coalition also celebrated the continuity in office of Ramón Capra.