Registrar orders general recount of votes to the Senate of the Republic in Colombia

Different sectors, political parties, presidential candidates and coalitions have pointed out irregularities regarding the results of the elections for the Congress of the Republic in Colombia. Following the claims, on Monday the national registrar Alexander Vega, the entity in charge of the scrutiny, announced a national recount for the results of the upper house.

“In order to safeguard the institutionality, in order to reach the electoral truth and with the presence of the president of the union; we have made the decision today, according to the countless inconsistencies of the E-14 forms to the Senate, as a national registrar I will again request the count of all Senate tables of the Republic,” Vega announced on Monday.

In the statement to the media, the registrar assured that the inconsistencies arose due to failures in the completion of the forms in which electoral judges must record the number of votes cast at the ballot box by each of the registered candidates or parties. Although he ruled out that it was a fraud, irregularities were found.

“These are human factors, there is no bad faith, I presume. There are some malicious actions that we are already going to compel the Prosecutor's Office, the Attorney General's Office on the part of the juries, but in order to give peace and transparency to the process, we are going to ask the National Electoral Council to authorize the counting of all the country's tables for the Senate corporation,” said Vega.

It should be recalled that the Colombian Congress is bicameral, composed of the Senate of the Republic and the House of Representatives. As explained by the official, the inconsistencies have occurred in the first, but not in the second.

The results delivered after the closing of the polls on Sunday, March 13, which are called pre-counting and are purely informative; they differed widely from those thrown by the ballot, when the judges count the votes and have legal results, which gave three more seats to the Historical Pact, the coalition of left, and they took one away from the Democratic Center, Conservative and Hope Center Coalition.

President Iván Duque, who convened a meeting to evaluate actions on the doubts raised, also asked Monday for further scrutiny to confirm the results. Even the leader of the governing party, Centro Democrático, former president Álvaro Uribe, had raised the possibility of ignoring the results.

“In view of the Electoral Guarantees Commission that will take place tomorrow and in order to give citizens confidence in the transparency of the electoral process, it is advisable to consider, on the part of the National Electoral Council, to move forward with a general recount in the election to the senate,” wrote the head of state.

In development...

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