OK, I have made a mistake. All is not lost for Peru’s best candidate, Lourdes Flores. She may still make the runoff.

I misread one of Alvicho’s Off Topic posts on the electoral outcome. He had a headline up about the expat vote, but the tally he posted was for the Peruvian electorate as a whole, not just the expats. That’s why I thought the expats were going for Humala. They probably aren’t.

Rici, posting a note at Fruits and Votes pointed this out to me. He says the expat vote is still expected to go mostly for Lourdes Flores and it’s still coming in. A big problem is just physically getting them in from various overseas outposts, he says. With a close election, it’s unexpectedly important.

As I look at the election site here, it looks like there is still 4% of the vote to be counted, and the overseas voters account for 2% or 3% of the entire electorate. It may be most of them, then, along with the people who live in remote areas of Peru. Flores is moving up in the ranks. Roughly, it’s Humala 26%, Flores 20% and Garcia 20% with Garcia slightly ahead.

Hellooooo market rally today in Peru!

Rici writes:

Publius: the presidential vote is simply one person, one vote; congressional districts do not play a role. In fact, Lima is slightly overrepresented in presidential elections; for one thing, the effective turnout is slightly higher (I saw news footage of people who????????d ridden three hours on horseback to vote at a rural poll; obviously, not everyone is going to do that) and for another thing there an estimated one million people who do not have identity cards, almost all of whom will be in remote parts of Per????.

Also, there????????s no evidence I????????ve seen that the foreign vote is going to Humala, although it????????s hard to know since it isn????????t showing up in the official counts yet. Apoyo estimated 60% of it would go to Flores, though, which is what early returns are showing.

The problem with counting the foreign vote is getting the poll reports physically to Lima; that takes a couple of days. (According to El Comercio, the early returns in the count were faxed in, but it turned out that many of them were illegible.) It also takes a couple of days to get reports from some of the remote parts of Per????.

See the rest at Fruits and Votes here.

Meanwhile, Alvaro Vargas Llosa gives more thoughts at The Washington Post explaining the dynamics of the election. He notes that Peru’s young voting base has little memory of Alan Garcia during his first horrible term, and that’s helping him. The article also says that Garcia claims he’s learned his lesson this time and won’t destroy the economy again. Yeah, sure. Vargas Llosa is skeptical of that claim in this interview with Christian Science Monitor, noting that Garcia has a political base with a strong obsession with class hatred. Read it here.

South Florida Sun-Sentinel has a good sampling of man-on-the-street interviews of the 15,000 Peruvian expats who voted in the election here.