What is Form E14 and what does it have to do with missing votes in the pre-count of congressional elections in Colombia

Undoubtedly, one of the elections that have given the most to talk about in recent years was those held on March 13, where uncertainty and doubt troubled various political sectors. After the controversy that arose with the result of the elections, the two main ones singled out were the Registrar's Office and Registrar Alexander Vega, since despite the insistence of the recount of votes, this decision was pushed back, leaving several political actors with great annoyance at the results.

“I don't feel defeated, I feel the winner that most parties don't accept my request; very good because the point of honor is consensus and if that request served to generate consensus, I think it is satisfactory for the electoral process (...) We will continue to work, I fully trust the decisions taken by the National Electoral Council, I believe in the scrutiny and the alternative that I had presented was to seek that peace of mind,” said the registrar.

However, this decision does not convince many, since what happened with the Historical Pact, where the pre-count was held, confirmed the appearance of 400,000 votes, something that changed the landscape in the congress as they managed to add three more seats in the Senate, leaving the Democratic Center, the Centro coalition, affected Esperanza and the Conservative Party who each lost one seat. This is of great concern to political parties in the face of the presidential elections that will take place on 29 May.

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All this situation that arose with regard to the results could have arisen because of an issue in the E14 forms and what would be a flaw in the design that caused confusion among the employees hired and they could have hidden votes from some collectivities. In the run-up to the elections, the Electoral Observation Mission (EOM) demanded technical commissions from the Registrar's Office to discuss issues of the mechanics of the election process.

Days before the legislative elections and despite the lack of prior socialization, the EOM and the Historical Pact sent a concern to the Colombian National Registry about the three E14 forms that should be filled out by the voting juries; they stated that they could have had a serious design error.

The Historic Pact coalition appeared as a closed list in the Senate and was at the bottom of the last page of the national constituency, which would create an inconvenience when reading the result since it was not as visible as the parties that had the lists open. This was not only a problem for the voting juries, but also for the disseminators of the information in the pre-count, who were hired by the Registrar's Office and could have bypassed the Historical Pact.

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“They reported that these problems were going to happen. The damage was done because the forms were already printed because the elections were only a few days away. In any case, the Registrar's Office would have been able to instruct the persons hired well to avoid the error. Emphatically clarify that they did not skip the party,” said Mauricio Vela, coordinator of the EOM's Political Electoral Observatory on Democracy in an interview with Semana.

This situation set off alarms in the Historical Pact because in the pre-counting of the votes, they noticed that in several tables there were no votes in their favor, which generated many doubts and some complaints from the coalition, it was for this reason that they requested that the E14 forms be reviewed. According to the EOM, the fact that the Historical Pact was placed at the bottom of the last page to the Senate meant that the disseminators could skip the list.

“This disclosure is given very quickly and on the same day of the election so that the Registrar's Office shows them on the same day of the election. It's a person calling with the form in hand, dictating the numbers of the match. At the same time, another person receiving and writing down in the form of codes. This design and the lack of pedagogy were often skipped to the Covenant,” said Vela at Semana.

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It is for this reason that the counting avoids this error since there are warnings when the number of voters does not match the votes, this led to the recovery of nearly 400,000 votes in the Historical Pact. The EOM assures that about 87 per cent of the tables in which the Historical Pact did not have votes were due to an error and this caused the variation between the results, so the responsibility lies with the Registrar's Office.

“It was a total mistake. Of design, of not instructing people well and not recognizing mistakes. If the problem is recognized early, political parties could deploy their electoral witnesses to review the change in voting,” Vela said.

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