2019 Bolivian general election

Evo MoralesMAS-IPSPElection results annulled Jeanine Áñez becomes acting president. The 2019 elections were to be rerun in May 2020, but were postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The President of Bolivia is elected using a modified two-round system.

About 2019 Bolivian general election in brief

Summary 2019 Bolivian general electionEvo MoralesMAS-IPSPElection results annulled Jeanine Áñez becomes acting president. General elections were held in Bolivia on 20 October 2019. Voters elected all 130 members of the Chamber of Deputies and 36 senators and cast ballots for a joint slate of president and vice president. Disputes over the transparency and legitimacy of the elections prompted weeks of widespread protests in Bolivia after incumbent President Evo Morales was declared the winner. Morales agreed on 10 November to hold new elections, at a date to be determined. The 2019 elections were to be rerun in May 2020, but were postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The President of Bolivia is elected using a modified two-round system; a candidate wins outright if they receive more than 50% of the vote and are at least 10 percentage points ahead of their closest rival. If neither condition is met, a run-off election is held between the two top candidates. A successful ‘yes’ vote would have allowed Morales and Vice President Álvaro García Linera to run for another term in office in 2019. Morales had already been elected three times. The first time, in 2006, is not counted as it was before the two term limit was introduced by the 2009 constitution. The governing party, the Movement Towards Socialism–Political Instrument for the Sovereignty of the Peoples, sponsored an effort to amend this article. The referendum was authorized by a joint session of the Plurinational Legislative Assembly on 26 September 2015, by a vote of 112 to 41. Despite the referendum result, the Supreme Court of Justice – referring to Art.

23 of the American Convention on Human Rights – ruled a little over one year later in December 2017 that all public offices would have no term limits despite what was established in the constitution, thus allowing Morales to running for a fourth term. By the time the primary was held, only one candidate had been registered for each of the nine parties or alliances participating in the general elections. The closest challenger was Virginio Virginio Lema, who received 7% of his total votes. On January 27 2019, the TSE announced that nine candidates would be used for the presidential elections. On the same day, however, the opposition Democrat Social Movement announced that they would use two independent processes for the first time in the presidential election. On 22 June 2020, Áñaez approved a law passed by both the Chamber and Senate to set a date for the election for 6 September 2020 and the elected authorities in place by mid to late November 2020. The opposition party MAS retained their supermajority of more than two-thirds in both chambers in opposition to the government, although they would lose this in the 2020 elections. A later report by CEPR, a left leaning think tank, alleged that OAS’s findings of electoral irregularities were primarily due to an OAS programming error during analysis. As a result of the annulment of the 2019 elections, the second vice president of the Senate, JeanineÚnez, assumed the interim presidency of Bolivia on 12 November 2019.