This is not the first time that there have been recounts: this is how it happened in the 2014 and 2018 elections

On Thursday, March 17, the Senator of the Green Alliance, Antonio Sanguino, announced that he will file a guardianship to suspend the scrutiny of Colombia's legislative elections in order to restart the recount of votes, due to multiple allegations of inconsistencies in the process.

The senator, who according to the first reports would not be able to repeat seat in Congress, also reported that he would cite a debate on political control “in view of the evidence of irregularities in the legislative elections” calling on the alternative and opposition sectors to join this proposal, stating that it could not be repeated which took place in the elections of 19 April 1970, in which Misael Pastrana won.

“I think the matter is much more serious, what is more, we will file a guardianship to suspend the scrutiny and recount, and we are going to file criminal complaints against juries at tables where I have proven that votes were stolen from me,” said Sanguino in statements collected by W Radio.

These statements by the parliamentarian are in addition to those of several political parties and candidates, especially from the alternative sectors”, who denounce “electoral fraud” in elections that had been questioned, including by Vice President Marta Lucía Ramírez, and in which opposition communities gained access to several seats.

For its part, the Electoral Observation Mission (EOM) announced this Thursday that in the process of counting votes in these elections, which defined the formation of the new Congress and the unique candidacies of political coalitions, inconsistencies have been evident in the filling of the E-14 forms.

The Mission indicated that during the process of pre-counting votes, which is currently being carried out, inconsistencies have been identified linked to the decision to maintain three E-14 forms, which represent the records of the Registrar's Office in which the number of votes obtained is processed, and which have already been questioned in past committees.

“Inconsistencies ranging from improper filling of form boxes and incorrect sums of votes cast, inadequate capture of them in the pre-counting system, to cases of manipulation and alteration of the results deposited on the form by voting juries, who have even done so have been publicly recognized,” said the EOM in its post-election statement.

In the 2014 legislative elections, the Council of State ordered three seats to be handed over to the Christian Mira party, after evidencing that there were irregularities during the legislative elections within which there were unjustified differences between the Minutes of Counting of Boards signed by the juries ( forms E14) and the Minutes of the Counting Committees (forms E24).

Due to the court's ruling, Gloria Stella Díaz, Manuel Virgüez and Carlos Alberto Baena assumed their seats in the Senate, a news that was celebrated by the evangelical community that stated that “although the Law and a Guardianship ordered the counting of votes, this instruction was not fully complied with by some electoral authorities, which which led to the cancellation of thousands of votes that were actually valid, while at the same time it was possible to verify that there was manipulation and sabotage of the software that handled the polling information system”.

However, this is not the only case that has been evidenced in an election, in 2018 during the congressional elections, the Colombia Justa Libres party managed to recover more than 33,000 votes that allowed it to overcome the threshold and obtain the three seats that had been assigned to the Conservative Party, Decency List and the Green Alliance .

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