Preserving Elections in Guatemala

A case study published in November 2025 by Dinorah Azpuru and Virginia Pinto examining how the 2023 results survived the second-half crisis. It records that Arevalo won the run-off with 60.9 per cent (2,442,718 valid votes) against Torres's 39.1 per cent (1,567,664), that 17.38 per cent of first-round presidential votes were null (955,389 ballots), the highest share since the democratic opening, and that the Constitutional Court-ordered review produced the same results the TSE had originally announced. Its first-round candidate figures are the preliminary ones (Torres 881,592, 15.86 per cent; Arevalo 654,534, 11.7 per cent) rather than the final totals certified in TSE Decision 1328-2023. It records that on 30 November 2023 Congress stripped four of the five magistrates who organised the elections of their immunity, on a complaint by the Attorney General's Office alleging corruption in the procurement of the TREP system, that in March 2024 a judge barred those four from holding office pending proof that the accusations were false, and that the TSE has since worked with one magistrate and substitutes. It documents the FECI raid of 29 September 2023 on election facilities and TSE headquarters, in which 160 ballot boxes containing around 125,000 official electoral records from the first round were seized, and attributes the preservation of the result to a whole-of-society response including domestic observation missions that ran a parallel vote count and found the fraud accusations unfounded.