Dominican ruling party declares election win

SANTO DOMINGO, May 16 (Reuters) - The campaign of Dominican President Leonel Fernandez declared that he had won Friday's election in the first round, with enough votes to avoid a run-off.

Campaign chief Francisco Javier Garcia said that with 61 percent of the votes counted, according to an internal tally by Fernandez's centrist Dominican Liberation Party, the president had won nearly 54 percent of the votes.

"We got the result in the first round," Garcia told reporters, dismissing any possibility of a June 30 runoff. (Reporting by Tom Brown, Editing by Michael Christie)