Petro requests meeting with international observers over alleged electoral fraud in Senate elections

The presidential candidate, Gustavo Petro, denounced on his social networks an alleged “gigantic fraud” recorded in the elections of March 13. The senator explained on his Twitter account how “hundreds of thousands of votes disappeared” from the Historical Pact, a coalition of which he is a part.

Petro released on Tuesday a series of images showing the E-14 forms for each match. To contextualize, the candidate showed the Conservative Party's ballot record, in which each of the candidates — being an open list — has some boxes to write how many votes they received.

The senator then showed what the form was like for the U Party, which had the same boxes and at the bottom was a small space for the coalition to which the candidate belongs. “Since the Pact is a closed list and does not have numbers, they submit the data as an aggregate below the U Party form,” Petro explained.

Taking this into account, the senator denounced that, “at 30,000 tables the juries sent the photo of the U form cutting out the piece of the Covenant and thus erased the votes transmitted.” In turn, he asked the Electoral Witness Commission of the Historical Pact to hold a meeting with all the delegations of international oversight, “to explain to them what is perhaps the biggest blur of votes in the history of legislative elections,” he added.

This situation had been warned by the Historical Pact before. According to the political leader, the coalition sent a letter to the Registrar since March 3, stating that “they would use the pre-counting of votes to reduce the actual information on the number of votes in the Covenant,” he said in a Twitter thread, “removing from the photo the pact box that they abusively put at the bottom of the Pact form the U”.

The truth is that what the senator denounced this Tuesday is not the first irregularity that has arisen with the coalition. On February 14, Petro stated that 67,000 electoral witnesses identified that, “at one in four tables there are no votes for the Covenant to Congress throughout the country, and in one out of every four tables the votes doubled to the open lists, adding logo and number of candidates.” The candidate pointed out that, “each of the tables must be scrutinized” and shared the following data:

Complaints on Form E-14

The controversy with the E-14 forms has not only been denounced by Gustavo Petro. Some time after learning the results of the elections, citizens accused the Registrar's Office of committing electoral fraud on social networks.

One of the main reasons has to do with the fact that the entity's digital platforms did not work properly during Sunday, March 13. They were later criticized because, allegedly, several E-14 forms were altered. Most reports say that the fraud would have been committed in favor of Federico Gutiérrez, winner of the Team's inter-party consultation for Colombia.

The E-14 has the name of each applicant printed on it and next to it there are three empty boxes to be filled digit by digit of the total number of votes. In case there are extra boxes, it is recommended to fill it with an asterisk so that there is no room for someone else to add other numbers and there is fraud. However, netizens shared some images showing how, despite the asterisks, several boxes were later modified.

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