Argentina · Salta / CERRILLOS

La Merced — Municipal council

All 24 provincial jurisdictions are screened; 3,440 current provincial/local or shared-ballot units are registered. Recovered archives now cover all provinces. All 804 previously inaccessible Córdoba tribunal tables are restored, adding local histories and replacing provincial secondary vote transcriptions. Several local tiers have inventories or winner-only evidence without three full returns. Corrientes and Santiago del Estero executive cycles outside the window are excluded. Partial chamber renewals, Santa Fe commune reform, conventions and replacements remain distinct. Older local votes, selected certificates and 2027 office calls remain incomplete. Ten 2023 Catamarca local returns are recovered from DINE provisional table data through exact single-municipality department bridges; they remain excluded from complete-cycle metrics pending final-tally reconciliation.

Historical competition

Competitiveness index for a verified actual-event sequence withheld. Actual-event and/or comparability review incomplete.

Provisional imported-series CI: 85.7/100. This uses the three displayed comparison cycles and retains the open event/boundary audit. It does not confirm the latest three actual completed elections.

Grouped party-share volatility: latest interval — points; earlier interval 6.0 points; two-interval mean — points.

Grouped Pedersen lower bound (percentage points). Nine exact standalone party-name categories in the archived returns; accents normalized. Provincial alliances and renamed coalitions remain Other. A category records its published name, not a verified legal succession or inferred allocation of alliance votes. An interval is withheld if either election has no list mapped to an explicit named group. This is aggregate share change, not individual voter switching. Event review: Actual-event and/or comparability review incomplete

Current government and control: Unverified. Local government-risk forecast: unassessed.

National polling context: National presidential approval; context for subnational races — AtlasIntel / Bloomberg; fieldwork 2026-07-30 to 2026-08-03. Sample 1,120; reported margin of error ±3.00 percentage points. Earlier comparison wave; named officeholder and question wording retained. Poll report

National polling context: National presidential approval; context for subnational races — AtlasIntel / Bloomberg; fieldwork 2026-08-30 to 2026-09-03. Sample 2,193; reported margin of error ±2.00 percentage points. Approval rose 1.0 percentage point while disapproval fell 4.4 points; approval movement is smaller than the combined reported survey uncertainty. The negative approval balance remains a national headwind for Milei-aligned candidates, conditional on local alliance and incumbent identity. Poll report

Final province archive, including 2017 Coronel Moldes, 2021 Aguaray and 2025 Rivadavia Banda Norte replacements. Council renewal size changed after the constitutional/charter transition; the elected cohort is preserved. Future formal call and independently verified current control remain open.

Registry and evidence links: Source 1, Source 2, Source 3, Source 4

Electoral event evidence

Separate source records can belong to the same election cycle. Recounts, runoffs and void returns do not create additional cycles.

Snapshot 13 September 2026. Fixed election window 8 September 2026 to 8 March 2028. Record AR-SA-C-36.