Peruvians in Utah will count among the voters weighing in Sunday in Peru's presidential election

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Peruvians in Utah will be able to vote in Peru's presidential elections on Sunday in Salt Lake City.
Around 6,333 Peruvians are properly registered in Utah to vote, Peruvian Consulate officials estimate.
Chileans in Utah were able to vote in Salt Lake City in that nation's presidential balloting last December and Salvadorans were able to do the same in 2024.

SALT LAKE CITY — Peruvians go to the polls Sunday to vote for a president, and Salt Lake City will host perhaps up to 6,000 or more of the voters.

"The Peruvian community in general has shown a lot of interest in being able to participate in the elections and chart the political, economic and social course of our country in the coming five years," the Peruvian Consulate in Salt Lake City said in a statement.

While most voters will cast ballots in Peru, Peruvians living abroad can also vote if they're properly registered, and the local consulate will operate a polling place for Peruvians in Utah on Sunday. Voting in Salt Lake City runs from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. and will be held at the Hilton Salt Lake City Center. Voters must have already registered their Utah address with Peruvian authorities and will need to show a Peruvian national identity card, though expired cards are acceptable.

Many Latin American countries permit voting by citizens living abroad, reflecting the strong ties many expatriates maintain when they leave their home countries. Chilean voters in Utah cast ballots here in that country's presidential contest last December and Salvadorans voted in Utah in the Central American nation's presidential contest in 2024. Mexicans in the United States were able to vote electronically in that country's presidential election two years ago.

According to Reuters, 35 candidates are vying for the presidency of Peru, with the top two vote-getters to face off in a final round of voting on June 7 if none receives more than 50% of the ballots cast. Recent polling shows right-wing candidate Keiko Fujimori with a narrow lead, followed by three others — Rafael Lopez Aliaga and Ricardo Belmont, former mayors of Lima, the Peruvian capital, and Carlos Alvarez, a former comedian, Reuters reports.

Voters will also pick a vice president, senators and congressional deputies.

The Peruvian Consulate estimates that 25,000 to 30,000 Peruvians live in Utah, but says that only around 6,333 of them are properly registered to vote. Czibor Chicata-Sutmöller, the general consul of Peru, called on them to cast ballots. The new president will serve a five-year term.

"Let's be part of Peru's future," he said in a message posted to the consulate's Facebook page. "Be part of the democratic party."

Peru has 17 consular offices in the United States and more than 100 worldwide, and they'll all be organizing vote centers, according to information from the Salt Lake City consulate. In the United States, voting by expatriate Peruvians will be held in 23 cities.

Crime and corruption are key concerns among Peruvian voters, according to Reuters. José María Balcazár, picked by the Peruvian Congress to replace his predecessor, removed from office due to corruption allegations, currently serves as Peru's president, the eighth leader in the nation since 2016, according to the British Broadcasting Corp.

The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.