Exclusive: By mistake, the Government counted blank votes and now Kicillof surpasses 52%

Due to a Government's error, provisional counting of votes included blank votes when only affirmative ones must be taken into account. According to the correct calculus, candidate Axel Kicillof obtained more than 52% of the votes, while Maria Eugenia Vidal got 34.6%.

Discussion arises because provincial Electoral Law, which takes after the National Law that created PASO (obligatory open and simultaneous primary elections), has a slightly different wording on the point of votes counting. The provincial Law states "validly casted affirmative votes" while the national one says ""validly casted votes". The difference consists in the word "affirmative" that implies that blank votes must not be counted as part of the denominator and therefore raises the percentages, explained to LPO a source from Justicialista Party (PJ).

Though, national Low requires a bare minimum to take part in general elections of 1.5% of the validly casted votes and Buenos Aires' law the same percentage of the validly casted affirmative votes. National wise, blank votes are valid ones but not affirmative once. That is why they are accounted in the national scrutiny, but not in the Province.

This means that in the last primary elections, Kicillof did not get 29.34% of the votes, as the official website shows, but 52.53%."Provincial Electoral Board shall conclude the definitive scrutiny as stated by its Law and inform the final results again. Axel was elected by 52.53% of the citizens of the province on Buenos Aires", said the PJ sources.

Right after LPO published this scoop, TV broadcasters interviewed parties representatives. "We've just learned the news", replied Jorge Landau, PJ's representative to Cronica TV and he added: "For governor, blank votes shall never be counted".On the other hand, official sources explained that the national website that presented the election data had to be comparable among all provinces. "If we had taken this peculiarity of Buenos Aires province into account, then the results wouldn't have been comparable. We ought to use one same criterion".