translated from Spanish: Poll reveals Evo wins in first round but loses in second

A survey published this Sunday (29.09.2019) by the newspapers Page Seven and Los Tiempos states that Bolivia’s president, Evo Morales, would win in the first round of the next election s he was defeated in the December balotage by Carlos Mesa. According to the survey, conducted by the company Mercados y Muestras, the current representative would get 33 percent of the votes in October.
Second there would be Mesa, standard-bearer of the Citizen Community (CC) alliance and former president, who would add up to 26 per cent of the endorsements. Long further behind, opposition Senator Oscar Ortiz of the Bolivian alliance Dice No (9 percent) and evangelical pastor Chi Hyun-chung of the Christian Democratic Party, who barely a month after launching his candidacy, whose campaign has been marked by misogynistic and homophobic statements, gets 3 percent.
The electoral rule in Bolivia gives as the winner in the first round to those who exceed 50 percent of votes or 40 percent with 10 points advantage over the second, but if these circumstances were not given, there would be a runoff between the two most voted. This is where the results change for Morales, as according to the Poll Mesa would achieve 44 percent of the vote, up from 39 from the current representative.
Officialism would lose a majority in the Senate
The study, conducted with a sample of 3,600 interviewees in the country’s nine department alcapitals, plus the city of El Alto and 92 intermediate and rural cities, has a 95 percent confidence level and a margin of error of 1.7 percent. Among other results, he also notes that there are a high number of undecideds (26 percent) and that officialism would lose a two-thirds majority of the Senate that it has maintained in its last efforts.
In the first round, Morales, which aspires to a fourth consecutive term until 2025, would win in six of Bolivia’s nine regions, while Mesa would win in the other three, according to the poll. The opposition questions the representative’s candidacy, as it does not respect the outcome of the February 2016 referendum that rejected his new nomination. However, officialism succeeded in November 2017 for the Constitutional Court to declare that re-running was a human right of the president.

Original source in Spanish