A hypothesis regarding “foreign” fraud that may have occurred during Peru’s runoff election was developed by Sergio Pascual, a telecommunications engineer and anthropologist in Spain, former first secretary of organization for Podemos, and a contributor to election observation missions. His research for the Latin American Strategic Center for Geopolitics (CELAG DATA) sheds light on the election results, in which Keiko Fujimori won thanks to the overseas vote.
According to Pascual’s research, the trends in the vote count—first Keiko Fujimori with the urban vote, then Roberto Sánchez with the massive rural vote, and finally Fujimori with the overseas vote—can be explained by events that took place days before the election.
“Breaking Down” the Facts
The article breaks down the facts: “What happened with the overseas vote in the runoff election? To understand what was happening, we have to go back a few weeks, to April 21, 2026—just 10 days after the first round of voting. On that date, Piero Corvetto, until then a respected head of the National Office of Electoral Processes, unexpectedly resigned. The National Board of Justice (JNJ) had, ‘coincidentally,’ just opened a preliminary investigation into him. “Coincidentally,” the members of the National Board of Justice who initiated the process had been elected for the 2025–2030 term by a special congressional committee controlled by Fuerza Popular (the Fujimori faction) and its allies.
Just two days later, in another unexpected move, Carlos Pareja Ríos was appointed foreign minister. Pareja is a Fujimorist and makes no secret of it. On his Facebook page, he has photos with Keiko Fujimori’s chief advisor, Carlos Díaz-Rosillo. Pareja held positions of trust during Alberto Fujimori’s administration (director of South American Affairs, minister-counselor at the Embassy in Chile, and advisor to the Vice Ministry of Foreign Affairs). In fact, it was Alberto Fujimori who promoted him to ambassador and sent him to one of the most prestigious diplomatic posts: the Peruvian Embassy in Spain.
Thus, just a few days after the first round of voting, two key figures in electoral oversight had been removed and replaced in Peru. Only a few weeks later, on May 29, the reasons behind these changes began to come to light. The ONPE’s new leadership approved Resolution No. 000090-2026-JN/ONPE. The resolution, titled “Guidelines for Electoral Activities Abroad—Second Presidential Election 2026,” established a far-reaching change in the counting of overseas votes.
Regulatory Immutability Was Violated
The investigation also notes that historically, in the general electoral process, overseas votes were always the first to be included in the count—due to time zone differences across continents—with ballots scanned and digitized from remote consular offices.
However, the new regulation violated “the regulatory inviolability, which prohibits changing electoral rules during the year before the elections”; furthermore, its irregular transfer seriously compromised the chain of custody of the ballots.
Also noteworthy is the role played by the Peruvian mass media, which began to report that the overseas vote would change everything. “Something was gradually ‘correcting’ the tally of rural votes in favor of Sánchez. According to Fujimori supporters, that ‘something’ was the delayed inclusion of overseas votes,” notes Pascual.
“Did this hypothesis make sense? Once the vote count was complete, it was easy to simulate: all that was needed was to pretend that all of Keiko Fujimori’s and Roberto Sánchez’s overseas votes had been counted in advance, as if they had arrived during the first phase of the count—as happened in the first round. By simulating that these votes had already been counted, their effect would be discounted in the final phase of the count, and—theoretically—one could observe how, in that final phase, only the effect of the rural vote remained.
When we carried out this exercise, the trend continued to differ from what was expected. Indeed, Sánchez would have taken longer to close the gap with Fujimori, but as the count approached 98 percent—with a significant portion of rural Peru already included—he would have managed to overcome his entire deficit, including the overseas vote.
It seems clear that something happened during the Peruvian vote count. Why did the ballots pending review “coincidentally” come mostly from areas where Fujimori supporters are in the majority? Why did the JNJ force the replacement of the ONPE director at a critical moment—specifically, between the first and second rounds? Why was there an interest in saving the overseas votes—which were always counted first—for “the end”?
“There are many questions and many indications that something more than just the votes supported Keiko Fujimori in this recent election in Peru,” the researcher concludes.
You can read the original article at the following link: https://www.celag.org/elecciones-en-peru-un-fraude-extranjero/
