Following the denunciations made by various political groups about various failures in the counting of votes in the legislative elections of March 13, the director of the Electoral Observation Mission (MOE), Alejandra Barrios, said in dialogue with RCN Mundo that, during the vote count, three major mistakes were made technicians.
As the director of the EOM explained to the station, the first failure incurred during the counting of votes was that, according to her, there was a lack of training for juries by the National Registry Office.
The second error indicated that it is related to the design of the E-14 forms - documents that record the votes of each candidate or each political group - while the third failure, according to Barrios, was the great neglect and misfortunes of those responsible for counting votes.
The official then assured the radio station that these errors “led to the fact that today we have an omission in the transmission of the votes of the Historical Pact in one of every four tables in the country.”
You can also read: This is not the first time that there have been recounts: this is what happened in the 2014 and 2018 elections
Regarding whether these failures in the counting of votes could be considered as electoral fraud, in an interview with the newspaper El Espectador, the director of the EOM indicated that, at the moment, there is “insufficient information” to determine that there was fraud in the elections by “the authority electoral or through third parties”.
In this regard, given the large number of errors that have been evidenced in the E-14 forms, in his dialogue with the same media Barrios asked political organizations to “be rigorous with their electoral witnesses to accompany the verification.”
The director of the EOM also made a national appeal to the microphones of RCN Mundo for actions to provide “all guarantees and transparency to political organizations so that they can fully trust the final election results.”
In the last few hours, the National Registrar's Office finally released the partial results of the municipal polls of the Senate of the Republic, as well as the total votes obtained in the inter-party consultations.
According to the report submitted to date, of the 112,900 polls installed for the votes on March 13, 109,203 have been counted, while 2,139 tables have been counted abroad and 1,558 at the national level.
Thus, with the number of polls counted so far, the political groups that have accumulated the most votes are: Historical Pact, with 2,692,999; the Colombian Conservative Party, with 2,201,183, and the Colombian Liberal Party, with 2,078,858.
These were followed by the Green Alliance Coalition and the Hope Center, with 1,906,021; the Centro Democrático Party, with 1,874,762; the Radical Change Party, with 1,586,284, and the Party of the Union for the People “Party of the U”, with 1,494,098.
Here is the full list:
Regarding the results of the inter-party consultations, the Registrar's Office reported that, in the case of the Coalition Team for Colombia, they won a total of 4,145,691 votes, of which 2,161,686 were taken by 'Fico' Gutiérrez; for its part, the Historic Pact Coalition obtained 5,818,375 votes, of which 4,495,831 went to Gustavo Petro, and from the Centro Esperanza Coalition, a total of 2,287,603 were counted, of which 723,475 were obtained by Sergio Fajardo.
The entity also recalled that, “from the date of certification, the candidates who were winners in the consultations held on March 13, will have five working days to register the corresponding vice-presidential formula.”
KEEP READING