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Profilo dei diritti di voto

Guatemala

Central America · gt

A presidential republic under the 1985 Constitution. The president and vice-president are elected on one ballot for a single four-year term by absolute majority, with a run-off between the top two if no ticket passes 50 per cent, and the 160-member unicameral Congress is elected at the same time by closed-list proportional representation, 128 seats in 23 multi-member districts and 32 from a national list.

Profilo rivisto l'ultima volta August 29, 2026

Guatemala has held general elections every four years since the 1985 Constitution reopened electoral politics after decades of coups, military government and armed conflict. Every contest is run by the Supreme Electoral Tribunal, an autonomous body of five magistrates elected by Congress for six-year terms, which the Constitution treats as the highest authority in electoral matters. Voting is voluntary and registration depends on the citizen's own initiative, so the register covers only about four fifths of the voting-age population; serving police and soldiers are barred from voting altogether. Ballots are paper, counted by hand at each polling station by volunteer boards, and images of the tally sheets are transmitted the same night to a preliminary results system that anyone can inspect while the legally binding tabulation proceeds at departmental level. In 2023 that architecture was tested: the EU and OAS observation missions both found the two rounds professionally administered while documenting sustained attempts by the Public Ministry and criminal courts to delay or reverse the officialization of the result, and the declared winner took office in January 2024.

Come funziona oggi il voto

Età per votare
18 e oltre
Registrazione degli elettori
Avviata dall'elettore
Documento di identità
Documento d'identità con foto richiesto
Voto obbligatorio
No
Voto per corrispondenza
Non disponibile
Voto anticipato
Non disponibile
Voto online
Non disponibile
Voto dall'estero
Limitata

Registration is not automatic: a citizen must enrol in the Citizen Registry, and for 2023 the register closed on 25 March. It reached 9,361,068 voters, 54.1 per cent of them women, but that was only about 79 per cent of the voting-age population, with under-registration falling mainly on 18 to 25 year olds. Voters identify themselves at the polling station with the national identity card, the DPI. Some 40,000 members of the army and police have no voting rights at all and must remain in their facilities on election day, a restriction the EU mission judged out of line with instruments Guatemala has ratified; around 10,000 pre-trial detainees were not given any way to vote in 2023, and there are no arrangements for voters whose physical or health condition prevents them attending in person. Voting abroad exists only for the presidential race, must happen on the same date as voting at home, and in practice has been organised only in the United States: 90,708 Guatemalans there were registered for 2023 and 1,443 voted in the first round.

Come è cambiato il diritto di voto

Ogni voce registra un cambiamento in chi poteva votare, o in che modo — estensioni, restrizioni e riforme procedurali allo stesso modo.

  1. 1946Estensione

    The Electoral Law of 1946 gave women the vote and the right to stand for election, but on restricted terms: the ballot was optional and secret for women while it remained obligatory for men.

    Guatemala | Congress of the Republic | Data on women
  2. 1956Riforma

    The 1956 Constitution made voting obligatory for all literate women, while keeping illiterate women barred from standing for election.

    Guatemala | Congress of the Republic | Data on women
  3. 1965Estensione

    The 1965 Constitution extended the right to be elected to all citizens, ending the literacy bar on candidacy, though voting was still not compulsory for illiterate women.

    Guatemala | Congress of the Republic | Data on women
  4. 1983Riforma

    The Organic Law of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal, Decree-Law 30-83, created the Tribunal as an autonomous body independent of any other government authority; from 1983 it was charged with convening the National Constituent Assembly that wrote the constitution still in force. IFES dates the founding law itself to 1982.

    Election FAQs: Guatemala 2023 Presidential Election Runoff
  5. 1985Estensione

    The 1985 Constitution extended the right to vote to all citizens and established equality between the sexes.

    Guatemala | Congress of the Republic | Data on women
  6. 2016Estensione

    Decree 26-2016 reformed the Electoral and Political Parties Law to give Guatemalans resident abroad the right to vote for president and vice-president, on the same date as election day inside the country, and expanded the Tribunal's oversight of campaign finance and campaign use of the media.

    Election FAQs: Guatemala 2023 Presidential Election Runoff
  7. 2019Estensione

    Guatemalans abroad voted in a presidential election for the first time; the Tribunal opened four voting centres in the United States for 63,267 registered voters, of whom 734 cast a ballot.

    Election FAQs: Guatemala 2023 Presidential Election Runoff
  8. 2023Restrizione

    The EU observation mission judged the exclusion before the general election of two presidential candidacies, Carlos Pineda and Roberto Arzu, and one vice-presidential candidacy, Jordan Rodas, an unreasonable limitation on the right to stand; the body of its report lists a third presidential candidate, Oscar Castaneda, among those made ineligible. The OAS mission separately recorded that 4,155 of the 41,430 candidates registered as of 22 June, including four presidential tickets, had been excluded.

    EU Election Observation Mission to Guatemala 2023: Final Report

Garanzie sul conteggio

Tipo di scheda
Schede cartacee
Verifica post-elettorale
Ad hoc
Amministrazione elettorale
Commissione indipendente
Osservatori nazionali
Sì
Osservatori internazionali
Sì

Ballots are paper and counted by hand at the polling station: for the 2023 run-off there were 24,585 vote reception boards, each of five members including a president. Party agents, who are separate from the board, witness, verify and sign the tally sheet, and may photograph it; the sheet is then scanned to the Tribunal's preliminary results system, TREP, whose published images let citizens and parties check the arithmetic on election night. That system has no legal force. The binding tabulation is done by the municipal and departmental electoral boards, which hold review hearings on challenges filed at the polling stations, and article 245 of the Electoral and Political Parties Law requires final official results within eight days. There is no routine statutory audit or recount of an unchallenged result, so a full re-examination happens only when ordered, as the Constitutional Court did in July 2023. Article 243 of the same law, which has constitutional rank, makes the Tribunal and the departmental boards the only bodies competent to verify and qualify electoral documentation. In 2023 the Tribunal did not break the official results down to polling station level, which the EU mission found weakened the traceability the preliminary system had provided.

Da sapere

  • In the first round of the 2023 presidential election the null vote was the most-chosen option on the ballot. On the final figures the EU observation mission reproduces from Tribunal Decision 1328-2023 there were 964,775 null votes, 17.33 per cent of votes cast, plus 388,363 blank ballots, together outpolling every one of the 22 tickets.EU Election Observation Mission to Guatemala 2023: Final Report
  • International IDEA, working from the preliminary count, puts the 2023 first-round null vote at 955,389 ballots or 17.38 per cent, and records it as the highest share of null votes in any Guatemalan election since the democratic opening. Since the 1984 Constituent Assembly election the Tribunal has run 16 electoral processes, ten of them general elections, and every one of the ten presidential races has gone to a run-off.Preserving Elections in Guatemala
  • Serving police officers and active-duty members of the armed forces cannot vote in Guatemala and must remain in their facilities on election day.Election FAQs: Guatemala 2023 Presidential Election Runoff
  • The Tribunal's five magistrates are nominated by a Postulation Commission and must be approved by a two-thirds majority of Congress, serving six-year terms that do not run in step with the four-year presidential and legislative cycle.Election FAQs: Guatemala 2023 Presidential Election Runoff
  • The state part-funds parties at the equivalent of two US dollars for every vote cast for the presidential ticket or the national congressional list, but only for parties that clear 5 per cent of valid votes or hold at least one seat in Congress; private campaign spending is capped at 50 US cents per registered voter, which came to about 34.9 million quetzales per party in 2023.Election FAQs: Guatemala 2023 Presidential Election Runoff

Elezioni nel database

Elezioni

1

Esplora

Evidence LabFormula una domanda trasparente e analizza ogni caso corrispondente.CronologiaCasi documentati in ordine cronologico.Paesi gemelliIndividua paesi con regole di voto e garanzie comparabili.

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