Gilberto Tobón Sanín won the fifth largest vote in the Senate, but he burned. Why?

Perhaps one of the cases, left by the recent legislative elections, to show how the electoral system works, is that of Gilberto Tobón Sanín. The political analyst, teacher and doctor in Law and Political Science surpassed the majority of the elected congressmen in number of votes, but was not elected.

Tobón Sanín was registered as the top of the list for the Fuerza Ciudadana party, created by Hollman Morris and Carlos Caicedo, dissidents of the Historical Pact and who support the presidential candidacy of Gustavo Petro. With that position he achieved a not insignificant vote of 173,558 votes.

With that number of votes, Tobón Sanín was the fifth most voted candidate for the Senate of the Republic after Miguel Uribe Turbay and Maria Fernanda Cabal of the Democratic Center; Jonathan Ferney Pulido and Humberto de la Calle de la Centro Esperanza Coalition.

“Our electoral system is very doubtful,” Tobón Sanín said in a dialogue with Blu Radio, acknowledging its defeat. But the doubts to the system, he clarified, are not due to its defeat because although it seems like a contradiction, it has an explanation in the electoral system itself.

The number of votes obtained by a party and all its candidates must exceed the threshold, which is the minimum number of votes valid to enter the distribution of seats. In the case of the Senate, it was 3% of the valid votes cast. This means that if a party wins that number of votes, it will be entitled to seats in the corporation and in its own right it obtains legal personality. In the House of Representatives it is the same, the condition for the party is that by adding the total votes of its candidates, it will reach 3%.

So if, for example, elections have 20 million voters, only parties that reach 600,000 votes can access seats. The remaining ones lose their legal status so that they are around 599,000 votes. The exception is found in the movements of indigenous seats and negritudes, which have no threshold and personería is automatically won by those who win a seat.

In the case of Citizen Force it did not achieve the threshold for the Senate of the Republic, although it was very close. It obtained 439,596 votes out of the approximately 488,368 that had been established from valid votes, which represented 2.7% of the desired 3% required.

Although he was close, he didn't make it. That is why that party, which intended to be part of the progressive forces, did not enter into the distribution of seats and one of the most voted candidates was cut short in its aspiration for collective results.

“I'm not saying that I was robbed of my election. He had to pass the threshold and he stayed. I got a very high vote, the others didn't get it. They didn't get what they thought they were going to get. The possibility of voting was greatly oversized. That's what happened,” Tobón Sanín said in a dialogue with Blu Radio.

He even regretted a political calculation decision that did not bear fruit. “Maybe if I had stayed in the Historical Pact I would be a senator,” he said. Had it done, it would have helped to increase the number of seats in Gustavo Petro's alliance, which was the most voted in both houses, but it did not do so because it does not trust the closed lists that coalition had.

That same conclusion was held by Gustavo Bolívar, the top of the list of the Historical Pact. “A pity to lose almost 500 thousand votes of Citizen Force. About six less senators. And a great man like Don Gilberto Tobón Sanín, burned with 170,000 votes. A great injustice. By way of self-criticism: They should have been in the Covenant,” he wrote via Twitter.

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