Many of the people who voted on Sunday to elect a new President and the 57 legislators preferred to keep their vote private, according to analysts Sergio Araya and Claudio Alpízar, after evaluating the Election Day.
Araya, coordinator of the political projects of Konrad Adenuaer Foundation in Costa Rica of, said he was struck by the fact that
many of the people who came to vote showed no distinctive signs of any political party.”
The analyst said that
many people preferred to maintain their privacy and this makes the result open to different options […] We must analyze how much of that percentage of undecided voters are genuinely undecided and how many can be silent votes, people who prefer to keep silent on their decision because they feel it is not socially correct.”
Alpízar accepted that there are voters who prefer to keep their vote private, but doubted that it is due to the phenomenon described, but rather linked to political maturity.
It’s political maturity. They keep their decision to themselves in appreciation of the fact that the vote is secret and they don’t want to showcase it (…) They can be a very mature citizesn who may even have lost political affiliation,”
said Alpízar, who noticed a lot of participation in the voting centers, but not in the streets.
Araya, on the other hand, has noticed a bigger deployment of those parties that have historically had a strong presence in downtown San José and surrounding cantons, such as National Liberation (PLN), Christian Social Unit (PUSC) and Acción Ciudadana (PAC). He has also noticed the presence of National Restoration and added that he has observed a decrease in the presence of Frente Amplio.