Sunday’s election day brings good news for all of Costa Rica: voter abstention decreased. This means that more people decided to participate in these elections compared to previous years. According to data reported by the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE), voter participation in Sunday’s elections reached 70%, while abstention stood at 30%, with 85.4% of polling stations counted.
These figures contrast with the 2022 election, when participation reached only 60% of the population and 40% chose not to go to the polls. In other words, abstention in this election dropped by 10%. In 1953, the electoral roll consisted of just 294,000 people. That year, 96,000 voters chose not to vote, raising abstention to 32.8%. In the 1958 elections, 35.3% of the electorate also stayed away from the polls.
After that, the percentage declined and remained below or very close to 20% between 1958 and the 1994 elections. However, starting that year, abstention began to rise again, reaching 30%, a level it has not managed to drop below and which has instead shown an upward trend.
In the first round of the 2022 elections, for example, 3.5 million people were eligible to vote, of whom 1.4 million did not. This pushed abstention to 40%, an unprecedented figure in the country’s recent history.
An analysis conducted by the Council for the Promotion of Competitiveness (CPC) using election data from 2006, 2010, 2014, and 2018 identified the cantons with the lowest and highest electoral participation. During that period, Golfito recorded the lowest participation rate at 51.6%, followed by Corredores (53.6%), Talamanca (54.1%), and Osa (54.1%).
At the opposite end, Zarcero (81.3%), Flores (75.9%), Belén (75.6%), and Central Cartago (75.2%) show some of the highest average participation rates when considering all those electoral processes. Data from the current electoral process for each canton is still being finalized. The initial projection, which gives 30 seats to the Pueblo Soberano party, would make the ruling party’s bloc in the next government the largest in the Legislative Assembly in nearly half a century.
Since the 1980s, no party had managed to form a legislative caucus with three dozen members. The closest precedent dates back to 1982, when the National Liberation Party (PLN), under the administration of former president Luis Alberto Monge, achieved a bloc of 33 lawmakers. Since then, no political party had managed to exceed the maximum threshold of 29 seats.
The next Congress (2026–2030) also breaks with the trend of the past decade during which legislative blocs rarely exceeded ten lawmakers.
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