Prosecutor's Office will not investigate voting juries for “human error”

The Attorney General's Office announced on Tuesday that it will not investigate the voting juries that participated in the last elections to the Congress of the Republic for the “human errors” committed.

The entity's decision is made in the context of recent complaints by citizens about the inconsistencies between the pre-counting and the counting of votes. The national registrar Alexander Vega assured at the time that the real problem was presented on forms E-14, in which electoral judges were required to record the number of votes cast in the polls by each of the registered candidates or parties.

“These are human factors, there is no bad faith, I presume,” the official said, ruling out that it was an electoral fraud. In turn, he indicated that 80 per cent of the judges who were trained did not follow the instructions. It had been established that they should fill in the free cells of voting candidates with asterisks, but instead they filled in all the boxes, which made it difficult to visually identify the voting numbers and in turn affected, according to Vega, the transmission of results.

Despite these claims, the Prosecutor's Office decided not to investigate the juries. “We are not preventive, we can only deal with investigations that have a criminal connotation,” Deputy Prosecutor Martha Yaneth Mancera told Blu Radio.

According to the official, criminal investigations “are enshrined for all that are electoral competitions are eminently malicious, that means that situations of human error and whatever else arise will be at another stage, but not within the eminently criminal investigation activities”.

For its part, the Office of the Attorney-General of the Nation showed another concept in the face of the situation. The entity assures that they must open the respective inquiries against the complaints expressed by the citizens and “shall take care in a timely manner to carry out the appropriate disciplinary proceedings; against all public servants, against those who performed conduct before the elections and on election day disciplinable”, said prosecutor (e) Silvano Gómez Strauch, before the same media outlet.

It should be recalled that the Public Prosecutor's Office recently opened an investigation against four mayors of Santander for alleged irregularities in the regulation of electoral propaganda in their municipalities. Those involved are the mayors of Landázuri, Marlon Adrián Ballén Castellanos; Bolivar, Wilson Orlando Gamboa Sedano; Cimitarra, Luis Alfredo González Mosquera who is the president in charge; and Chipatá, Emilse Santamaría Castillo.

Registry will not ask for recount of votes after guarantee desk

During the National Commission for the Coordination and Monitoring of Electoral Processes, which took place on Tuesday at the request of the President of the Republic, Registrar Alexander Vega reversed his idea of requesting a general recount of the votes, as requested by some political sectors.

The idea had emerged this Monday and would be formally presented during this round of guarantees, “with the purpose of seeking a way out of this whole issue, to legitimize the result, that they were saying that fraud; fraud never existed”. However, the registrar met 12 political communities, out of the 16 attending the meeting, who raised their voice against the count at the guarantee table.

“Magistrates, President in Charge: For the peace of mind of the political forces, I will not submit the application. Obviously, there is also the right of political organizations that want to present it, but on the part of the Registry Office we are not going to present it,” he said during the Commission.

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