General elections were held in Argentina on 25 October 2015 to elect the President and National Congress, and followed primary elections which were held on 9 August 2015. A second round of voting between the two leading candidates took place on 22 November, after surprisingly close results forced a runoff. On the first runoff voting ever held for an Argentine Presidential Election, Buenos Aires Mayor Mauricio Macri narrowly defeated Front for Victory candidate and Buenos Aires Province Governor Daniel Scioli with 51.34% of votes. As of 2021, his vote count of nearly 13 million votes makes it the highest number of votes any candidate has ever received in Argentinian history. He took office on 10 December, making him the first freely elected president in almost a century who was not either a Radical or a Peronist.
Macri performed better among higher-income provinces in the central area of the country, while Scioli performed strongly in poorer provinces in the northwest, the northeast and Patagonia.
Background
President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner was re-elected in 2011. As the Constitution of Argentina does not allow more than two consecutive terms, several politicians from the Front for Victory (FPV) speculated about a constitutional amendment to allow unlimited re-elections. This idea was heavily resisted by the opposition parties, and the FPV could not reach the required two-thirds majority in Congress. The mid-term elections in 2013 ended the FPV's hope for a constitutional amendment after they failed to win the necessary supermajority.
Electoral system
The election of the president was carried out using the ballotage system, a modified version of the two-round system in which a candidate can win the presidency in the first round either by receiving 45% of the vote, or by receiving 40% of the vote and finishing at least 10 percentage points ahead of the second-place candidate. Voting is compulsory for citizens between 18 and 70 years old. Suffrage was also extended to 16- and 17-year-olds, though without compulsory voting.
There are a total of 257 seats of the Chamber of Deputies, elected from 24 electoral districts–the 23 provinces, plus the federal district of Buenos Aires, which its own executive and legislature and is represented in the national Congress like all other provinces. The number of seats are distributed in relation to the population of the province. In order to be in concordance with the "one-third female" law enforces that one-third of the overall seats in the Chamber of Deputies are female. The 130 seats of the Chamber of Deputies up for election were elected from 24 multi-member constituencies based on the 23 provinces and Buenos Aires. Seats were allocated using the D'Hondt method of proportional representation, with an electoral threshold of 3%.
The 24 seats in the Senate up for election were elected in three-seat constituencies using the closed list system. Each district is represented by three senatorial seats. Each party is allowed to register up to two candidates; one of those registered must be female. The party receiving the most votes wins two seats, and the second-placed party won one. The third senatorial seat was established in the Constitution of 1994 in order to better represent the largest minority in each district.
Parties and coalitions provided their own ballot papers, which voters placed in sealed envelopes. However, voters were able to cut ballot papers up and place different sections from different parties inside the envelope if they wanted to vote for different candidates or lists for different posts. Being under a Federal system, it is possible for different provinces to use different systems. In Buenos Aires and Salta electronic voting machines were used to print out a single unified ballot, with voters able to select different candidates and parties on a touch screen. Other municipalities such as Bariloche opted for a non-electronic single unified ballot. Opposition candidates, including Sergio Massa, Mauricio Macri and Margarita Stolbizer called for the nationwide implementation of a unified ballot and/or electronic voting, though Massa in particular was more cautious, saying it was more realistic for such a system to be implemented by 2017. The authority in charge of regulating elections rejected changing the system within 2015 since they claimed it would be too short term to implement the changes and explain to the public how the new system works.
Candidates
General election
These candidates received at least 1.5% of valid votes and passed to the general election.