Havana, (EFE).- Cuba confirmed this Monday that the lowest turnout in parliamentary elections since the revolution came to power in 1959 was registered in the elections the day before.
At a press conference, Alina Balseiro, president of the National Electoral Council (CEN), reported this morning based on preliminary data that 75.92% of the more than 8.1 million Cubans called to the polls.
This participation rate is almost 10 percentage points lower than that of the parliamentarians of 2018, a process that renewed the Parliament that elected the current president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, who succeeded Raúl Castro (2008-2018).
Despite being a very high percentage in any other country in the Western Hemisphere, the figure is considerably far from the historical average before 2018, above 90%.
The least crowded parliamentarians since the triumph of the revolution
However, the participation was higher than in the two appointments with the previous ballot boxes, the referendum on the Family Code in September and the municipal elections in November.
Balseiro added that 90.28% of the votes were valid in the parliamentary elections this Sunday. In total, 6.22% of the ballots were blank and 3.50% were cancelled, according to preliminary data from the SEN.
In addition, he pointed out that the 470 candidates -for 470 seats, the vast majority of whom were members of the Communist Party or related organizations- managed to exceed the threshold of 50% of the votes, for which they were elected.
The president of the SEN remarked that the process was carried out without notable incidents and legally. This is far from what was denounced by NGOs and dissidence inside and outside the island.
After Sunday’s day, three independent electoral observation NGOs -in Cuba there were no international observers- described the elections as the “most irregular” in the country since 1976 and considered that the “will” of the electorate was not met.