More than 27 million Peruvians voted on Sunday as the country chose a president, two vice presidents, 60 senators, 130 deputies and representatives to the Andean Parliament in an election marked by delays at polling stations in Lima and beyond.
The first voting table for the 2026 general elections was installed at 4:45 a.m. at the Carlos Noriega Jiménez school in Huanuhuanu, in the Caravelí province of the Arequipa region, but the morning did not unfold that smoothly in the capital. By 9:14 a.m., Carlos Álvarez was still going to vote at a school in San Isidro, Lima, even as voters in nearby districts reported long waits, missing materials and confusion over where to cast their ballots.
The scale of the vote made the disarray harder to ignore. Peru was choosing from 35 presidential candidacies while also returning to a bicameral Congress for the first time in three decades, a change that raised the stakes for an election day that was supposed to run on strict timing and basic order.
That order broke down in several parts of Lima. Voters in Surco said they were uncomfortable because voting tables were set up late, while people in Miraflores faced delays and confusion tied to a lack of electoral material and technical problems with computers and printers. Serious problems installing voting tables were also reported in Lima, with more than two hours of delay in dozens of voting centers across the city, including schools in Surco, San Borja, Miraflores, Villa el Salvador and other districts.
The picture in the capital stood in sharp contrast to the start of voting in Huanuhuanu, where the first table went up before dawn and thousands of mesa members across the country began setting up polling spaces from 6:00 a.m. The uneven rollout suggested an election that was administratively complex even before the results were counted, with Peru asking voters to fill a ballot that combined a presidential race, a restored upper chamber and a new lower house all at once.
What happened in Lima was more than a morning nuisance. It exposed how fragile the voting machinery was on a day meant to showcase a major institutional change, and it left election officials facing the task of delivering a clean count after a start that many voters already experienced as disorderly.
