Electoral Roundup.

• Position: Brief Article

DURING THE MONTH of May, the OAS had electoral observation missions working in five countries in the Hemisphere: the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Peru, Suriname, and Venezuela.

The May 28 Peruvian elections--the second-round presidential runoff--proved to be the most controversial. President Alberto Fujimori's only remaining challenger, Alejandro Toledo, dropped out of the race more than a week before the election, saying the government's vote-counting computer system raised the possibility of fraud.

The OAS chief of mission, former Guatemalan foreign minister Eduardo Stein, sought, to persuade the government to delay the vote for at least ten days to give observers time to test the newly installed computer system. He also raised concerns about other defects he said had not been corrected after the first round of voting.

Talks on a possible delay, however, broke down. Three days before Peruvians went to the polls to reelect Fujimori to a third term, Stein announced that the OAS mission was recalling most of its observers, leaving only a small technical team in Lima. The OAS mission chief said Peru's government had failed to correct numerous irregularities and concluded that "by international standards, the Peruvian electoral process is far from one that could be considered free and fair."

The OAS had deployed some ninety international observers around the country several weeks before the first round of voting on April 9, in which Fujimori fell just short of the 50 percent he needed to claim a victory. During that initial process, the OAS observation mission had expressed concern about such conditions as the lack of open debate and independent media coverage, as well as technical problems with the computerized vote-counting system.

In Venezuela, where elections had also been scheduled for May 28, events took a different turn. Three days before citizens were to go to the polls to vote for every elected office from mayor to president, the Supreme Court of Justice suspended the elections, citing technical problems and saying that voters did not have enough information.

Ruben Perina, chief of the thirty-member OAS observer mission to Venezuela, applauded...