Ballot Scheme Clouds Today’s Peru Election

LIMA, Peru — An aborted conspiracy to falsify presidential and congressional election returns raised fears Saturday of fraud in today’s nationwide balloting.

Presidential candidate Javier Perez de Cuellar charged Saturday that President Alberto Fujimori was responsible for the “reelection fraud,” in which 500 vote tally sheets were filled out in advance. Officials said most of the approximately 100,000 presidential votes on the sheets were for Fujimori.

Efrain Goldenberg, Fujimori’s foreign minister, blamed the scheme on a “band of crooks, people who trade in that material.” He said the “totally isolated episode” is under control and would not mar the elections.

But Perez de Cuellar, a former U.N. secretary general, contended that Fujimori should be held responsible, saying that the president’s party would “not even kill a fly without his confirmation.”

Fujimori has been far ahead of Perez de Cuellar in pre-election polls but has no assurance of winning enough votes to avoid a runoff. Twelve other candidates are expected to win only tiny percentages of the vote.

Many of Peru’s political parties sent a letter Saturday to the National Election Jury expressing “deep concern” over the tally sheet scheme and other alleged irregularities that they said “throw a shadow over the electoral process.”

The Peruvian press reported Saturday that police found the falsified ballot sheets in a business owned by two members of Fujimori’s Change 90-New Majority party in the city of Huanuco, 150 miles northeast of Lima.

Ricardo Robles, the top electoral official in Huanuco, identified the party members as Congressman Pablo Tello and Enrique Espinoza Zevallos, a campaign coordinator linked to Congressman Victor Joy Way.

Joy Way denied that his party participated in the conspiracy. And Blanca Nelida Colan, the country’s attorney general, said a preliminary investigation by her office determined that “there is no involvement by the government or any political party.”

In addition, the National Election Jury said it turned up no “reasonable evidence” of involvement by political parties or groups.

In addition to the falsified forms, police found about 2,500 blank tally sheets, used at polling tables to officially record ballot counts. Analysts said the seized sheets could have been falsified to represent up to 600,000 ballots, or about 6% of the expected nationwide turnout.

Perez de Cuellar said the scheme, discovered Thursday by police acting on a tip, could have spread beyond Huanuco. “We have information that these sheets may be present in other provinces,” he said.

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Authorities have detained at least 17 people in the case, including two employees of the National Election Jury’s warehouse in Lima. The tally sheets reportedly were stolen there.

Goldenberg said the falsified counts would have favored congressional candidates of several parties. But opposition politicians said most of the “votes” were for Fujimori’s party.

Perez de Cuellar urged a team of election observers from the Organization of American States to take action in the case. In 1992, after Fujimori suspended the constitution and closed the Peruvian Congress in a military-backed crackdown, OAS pressure helped persuade him to call new congressional elections six months later.

Perez de Cuellar also called on “patriotic members” of the armed forces to cooperate in guaranteeing clean elections. The military plays a key role in transporting vote tally sheets in some rural areas.

Meanwhile, thousands of soldiers and police were deployed across Peru on Saturday to ward off attacks by Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) guerrillas.

The Maoist guerrillas had entered three towns in the Huallaga Valley and warned villagers not to vote, police sources said.