Bolivians voted Sunday on whether to allow Evo Morales, a leftist who is under fire over corruption allegations, to seek a fourth term and potentially extend his presidency until 2025.

Already the country’s longest serving leader, the 56-year-old Morales cast his ballot in the coca-growing region of Chapare where he first emerged as a political force to become Bolivia’s first indigenous president in 2006.

Monitors from UNASUR, a regional political union, said polls opened “in a climate of absolute calm” in Bolivia, a major gas and mineral producer but one of South America’s poorest countries.

But angry voters set fire to ballots and ballot boxes at a polling station in the city of Santa Cruz after they learned there were no election registries, a spokesperson for the regional election tribunal said.

A lack of election materials delayed the start of voting at other places.

Polling station began to close at the scheduled 4:00 pm (2000 GMT) deadline, but election authorities extended voting in some places.

Local television stations are expected to air exit polls a few hours after the voting ends, with official results to follow.

Urging supporters to turn out in record numbers, Morales — an Aymara Indian — exhorted them to “let us know if they love me or not” by endorsing changes in the country’s constitution to allow him to run for a fourth term.

A late breaking corruption scandal involving an ex-lover of Morales appears to have hurt the campaign for a “Yes” vote, however.

Polls had shown voters to be evenly divided over the constitutional changes, but sentiment has swung sharply in the past week, with the “No” vote vastly favored in the most recent pre-election poll by a 47 to 27 percent margin.

– Another term? –

Since taking office the first time in 2006, Morales has been re-elected twice, most recently in 2014 to a five-year term that ends in 2020.

Under the current constitution adopted in 2009, sitting presidents can only seek re-election once.

But Bolivia’s Supreme Court ruled that Morales’s first term was exempt from the rule, allowing him to run again in 2014.

Last month, he became the longest serving president since Bolivia’s independence from Spain in 1825 — a rare accomplishment in a country known for military coups and shaky, short-lived governments.

The campaign formally ended on Thursday but continued furiously on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter throughout the weekend.

Voting is mandatory, and some 6.5 million Bolivians are eligible to cast ballots.

– Ex-girlfriend trouble –

Morales’s most recent, and perhaps most damaging, scandal relates to charges of favoritism shown to CAMC, a Chinese engineering company that won the bid for a major railroad expansion project.

One of the top managers at CAMC’s La Paz office is Gabriela Zapata, 28 — Morales’s former girlfriend.

Morales is single and has recruited his older sister to perform the functions of first lady.

However, he recently admitted to having a child with Zapata during a two-year relationship that began in 2005 when she was 18. Morales said the child later died.

The president rejected corruption allegations as “a hoax by the US embassy” to discredit him, and insists that he has “nothing to hide.”

In an attempt to clear his name, Morales has asked state accounting authorities to investigate the process by which the government signed contracts worth $576 million with CAMC.

Congress has also opened a probe into the allegations.

Morales has overseen robust economic growth in Bolivia, but opponents accuse him of presiding over corruption and investing in flashy infrastructure projects at the expense of health and education.

If the constitutional amendment he supports is rejected by voters, it would be Morales’s first election defeat.

A close ally of the late Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, Morales is testing his fortune at a time of disenchantment elsewhere in Latin American with longtime leftist leaders.
Source :AFP