High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! General elections were held in Costa Rica on 5 February 2006. In the presidential election, Oscar Arias of the National Liberation Party (Partido Liberacion Nacional), a former president and Nobel Peace Laureate, was victorious over Otton Solis of the Citizens' Action Party (Partido Accion Ciudadana) and twelve other minor-party candidates. Although Arias was expected to win by a wide margin, the actual polling reports were unexpectedly close. However, early results showed the contest to be closer than it actually was. The preliminary official report, after 88.45% of the vote counted, showed the result for President of the Republic almost tied between Arias with 40.51% of the vote and Otton Solis with 40.29%. Given the small difference of only 3250 votes, the Superior Electoral Tribunal announced that a manual count of all the votes would start immediately and no official winner would be announced until that process was completed,...