Election update

This past Sunday was the much-awaited Election Day! Everybody was whipped up into a frenzy the few days in advance, but by Sunday afternoon there was nothing to do but wait for the results, so a little calm settled in. 

I watched some of the news coverage and vote-counting with my host family, and they helped by explaining more of the voting process to me.  You show up to your voting location, which is determined by when you registered to vote, not by address, with just your ID card.  You have to sign in and give your thumbprint, because all Chileans have their thumbprints on their ID cards and in the government system. Then you get your paper ballots, and you go behind a little curtain and fill them out.  Rather than filling in bubbles, you draw a little line to cross the T next to your candidate (all candidates have a "_" next to their name, you have to draw a little vertical line to make it a "+"). Then you seal your paper ballots, come out, and drop them into the boxes for the corresponding election (president, senator, representative, etc. each on different ballots in different boxes). The boxes have glass sides, so that you can watch them filling up. Then when the polls close, the counting begins, and we got to watch footage of a lot of the poll stations counting out their boxes. One person starts by unsealing the ballots and passing them to the next person, who calls out the chosen candidate and shows the ballot outwards, to the little crowd of people gathered, while someone else keeps tallies. There are actually crowds gathered to watch the counting at some of the polls, and they cheer whenever the vote is for their candidate. For the presidential race, there were a total of 9 candidates on the ballot, and a candidate must win 51% of the votes to call victory. This almost never happens in the first round of elections, so there are run-offs between just the first two finalists.  As predicted, it came down to the two women frontrunners.  Michelle Bachelet, who was the former president (before the current one), got more votes but not 51%, so she and her opponent Evelyn Matthei can now concentrate their forces against each other for the final battle...