Updated at 6 p.m.

Buenos Aires City voting stations closed their doors at 6 p.m. on Sunday in the 2025 local legislative elections to renew half of the city legislature’s 60 seats. Electoral authorities said the day went by without any major issues. Results are expected to be known around 7:30 p.m.

Minutes before 6 p.m., around 50% of the eligible voters had cast their ballots, a record for Buenos Aires’ voter turnout. “The election day is developing with total normalcy in the entire city,” said Adrián González, spokesman for the Buenos Aires City Electoral Management Institute. “We invite citizens to participate in the electoral day and remind them that voting is a civic duty.”

Unlike other electoral years, there will be no primaries in 2025, neither for local nor national level contests in Buenos Aires. This means that Sunday’s results will be definitive. Because of the lack of primaries, there will be 17 lists from which to choose a candidate, a number experts are calling “unprecedented.”

Among the vast number of candidates, there are five standouts:

-Leandro Santoro will lead the center-left Peronist ticket, which will run under the name Es Ahora Buenos Aires.

-Silvia Lospennato will head the PRO party ticket, Buenos Aires Primero.

-Former Buenos Aires Mayor Horacio Rodríguez Larreta is running with his new party, MAD, on the Volvamos Buenos Aires ticket.

-President Javier Milei’s spokesperson, Manuel Adorni, will lead the ticket for ruling party La Libertad Avanza (LLA). 

-Ramiro Marra, a Libertarian and former LLA member who is already a city lawmaker.

All of the candidates had voted by 6 p.m., including Adorni, who broke the electoral secret by saying he had voted for himself when leaving the polling station.

President Milei voted at around 11:30 a.m. and on his way out of the polling station criticized PRO leader and former President Mauricio Macri, saying he is a “whiner made of glass” after Macri denounced that LLA supporters shared a deepfake AI video of Lospennato supposedly resigning to her candidacy on Saturday.

Although Milei was supposed to travel to Rome over the weekend to attend the inauguration of Pope Leo XIV, he ended up staying in Argentina due to what his staff called “agenda issues.” He is expected to await the results alongside Adorni, as the administration’s future electoral plans depend a lot on what happens on Sunday.  

Voters across the city used the Boleta Única Electrónica (Single Electronic Ballot) system of electronic voting. The country-wide elections for national deputies and senators on October 26, on the other hand, will use a Boleta Única de Papel (Single Paper Ballot). 

González, from the Electoral Management Institute, said that despite power cuts and electric issues in the area due to the strong storms that hit the city over Friday and Saturday, the voting system was working as expected, “without the need to use the electric network.”

Over 2.5 million people in Buenos Aires City were allowed to vote, including 524,040 foreign residents. Permanent residents can only vote for local authorities, such as the mayor and local lawmakers. This means they can cast their vote in the May 18 Buenos Aires legislative elections, but not in the national ones in October.