By Marcelo Rochabrun
LA PAZ (Reuters) – Bolivia’s official vote count showed socialist candidate Luis Arce with a majority of the vote with nearly 60% of ballots counted by late morning on Tuesday, backing up unofficial fast counts that had put him as the outright election winner.
The slow official count showed Arce with 50.01% and runner-up centrist Carlos Mesa with around 32% of the vote, indicating a gap of around 18 percentage points, far larger than pollsters had predicted in the run-up to the Sunday ballot.
Arce’s socialist MAS party has already claimed victory and Mesa conceded the loss on Monday.
(Reporting by Marcelo Rochabrun; Writing by Adam Jourdan)
