Constitutional Court overlooks reform of the Electoral Code

This Thursday, April 21, it was announced that the Constitutional Court overturned for the reform of the Electoral Code in which the new rules of the game for voting in Colombia were written.

According to the high court, the decision was taken because when conducting a detailed study of the project, procedural defects were found, despite the fact that the rapporteur judge, Jorge Ibáñez, requested to maintain the current rule.

Earlier, the National Registrar, Alexander Vega, was present before the Special Monitoring and Monitoring Commission of the Electoral Body of the Congress of the Republic. The official had to explain what happened during the pre-count of the legislative elections on March 13 and told what the strategic plan for the presidential elections on May 29 will be like.

The changes that will be made in the face of the next elections

After being heard and presenting the report, members of the House of Representatives asked to update the Electoral Code, calling on the Constitutional Court to accelerate the revision of the Code passed by Congress in 2020.

“This is a call from the committee today to the Constitutional Court to effectively speed up the process itself and the revision of the Electoral Code that was sanctioned by President Iván Duque,” said Representative Martha Villalba, president of the Follow-up Commission.

Vega announced that in order to ensure the normal development of the pre-count and to grant greater guarantees, a series of changes will be made to the established protocol.

He said that a double report will be carried out, that is, once the transmitters have finished the full dictation of a table, they must re-dictate it in its entirety.

“A double report will be made, the transmitters shall communicate to the recipients the information of the eight candidates and the other data on the E-14 form. Once they're done, they'll have to check again. If indeed the information corresponds in both reports, the precount is transmitted,” Vega Rocha said.

Registration of ballots

For the presidential elections, to date, it is reported that 1,841,170 citizens registered their citizenship card: 1,704,906 at the headquarters of the Registrar's Office nationwide and at points authorized by the entity throughout the country, and 136,264 in embassies and consulates of Colombia.

Citizens who changed their voting positions for the elections of president and vice president of the republic can consult their new position as of April 29, by going to: https://wsp.registraduria.gov.co/censo/consultar/.

Simulacros

As part of the preparation for the presidential elections, the National Registry will conduct the simulations of the processes of processing electoral data (pre-counting), auxiliary or zonal, municipal, district and departmental polls, digitization of E-14, as well as the functionality test in consulates, in the following dates:

Functionality test in consulates: May 5 and 6, 2022.

Pre-counting drill: May 14, 2022.

E-14 digitization drill: May 18, 2022.

Mock counting: May 20 and 21, 2022.

Likewise, the national registrar reiterated that all political parties may have auditors in all software, both for voting juries and for counting, in order to visualize in real time the progress of the processing of electoral data, download the E-14 minutes of claveros and MMV files of the results of the scrutiny and access the archives from table to table with pre-count voting and newsletters.

Finally, he said that political campaigns will have one month to run, again, their voting juries and electoral witnesses. In addition, he assured that juries that presented serious anomalies in the last elections of the Congress of the Republic will be excluded from the 5109 voting stations.

“The important thing is that the form of assignment will be changed again and the experience as voting juries in past elections will be taken into account,” he said.

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