What follows after Registrar Alexander Vega's decision not to order a vote count

Since last March 13, the day of the first elections that were held in the country, the debate regarding the failure in the count that was evidenced and reported has not stopped. Recently, after the national registrar, Alexander Vega, announced that a recount would not be requested, the consequences of that action began to be known. The decision of the National Registrar's Office was heard after the National Commission for the Coordination and Monitoring of Electoral Processes.

“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,” said the official.

As he highlighted, his decision does not prohibit a political party from being able to ask the CNE for a recount, as long as it meets the requirements required to do so. “You can ask for anything you want, the problem is that it is granted, that there is evidence and that is when you have to go in to study how supported the application is,” explained Pedro Felipe Gutiérrez, a judge of the National Electoral Council (CNE), in testimonies collected by RCN.

According to what specialists explained to the same media outlet, what continues in the process is to move forward with the scrutiny in the same way that it was being done. It should be borne in mind, the news said, that the municipal counting is already 100% complete, for example. The departmental scrutiny, for the time being, is at 25%. At the end of the latter, national scrutiny is continued, that is, the total result by adding the results of the departments. It would then enter into an accreditation process by the CNE.

To enter the process of accrediting the election and defining the legal status of the elected, there is a deadline until July 19. “I defend the scrutiny. The request that I made yesterday was to be submitted today and I have not submitted any applications. That was done with the purpose of looking for a way out of this whole issue of legitimizing this result, which they were saying that there was fraud and fraud never existed,” Vega added.

“It is not reasonable or adjusted to the Colombian system for a general recount of the vote for the Senate to be carried out because the stages provided for in the legal system have already been processed (...) A recount would lead to an institutional crisis because there could be candidates who were not happy with the result and asked for a recount,” said lawyer and former magistrate José Gregorio Hernández during the meeting.

The newspaper El País, for example, described the counting of votes as an 'endless process'. “As there was no record, we didn't know how to do it either,” he said on that information portal, which, in addition, recalled that by Sunday, March 13, 17,000 juries participated and there were 112,000 voting stations. The scandal became visible when, through social networks, citizens denounced multiple changes and modifications to the E-14 formats. He was also alerted of poorly added votes, crossovers, uncounted tables, among other things.

Before the debate between candidates that took place in the space created by the newspaper El Tiempo and the magazine Semana, Gustavo Petro said that, thanks to an early detection system, they had “detected 29,000 tables out of 112,000 that exist throughout the country, where there is not a single vote for the Historical Pact. And that is not possible, given the magnitude of the vote already demonstrated. We hope that the electoral authorities will allow it because we are convinced that there is a cat locked up there.” This complaint was made a day after the elections.

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