President Iván Duque called a meeting of the Electoral Guarantees Table for next Tuesday in order to clarify the doubts that the results of the elections for the Senate last Sunday have left.whose scrutiny gave the left about 400,000 more votes than initially announced.
(Uribe asks for a recount of the votes and says that the result cannot be accepted).
“I convened the Electoral Guarantees Table for next Tuesday (…) so that the electoral authorities, as independent authorities, can clarify all the doubts that exist regarding those polling places related to the election of the Senate that have generated controversy”Duke said in a statement.
Faced with controversial situations, in some parts of the country in Senate votes and that involve pre-count and scrutiny processes, which are the responsibility of the Electoral Organization, we have decided to convene the National Electoral Guarantees Commission for Tuesday pic.twitter.com/SqMwGls6S3
– Ivan Duke ?? (@IvanDuque) March 19, 2022
The preliminary count on Sunday gave the leftist Historical Pact 2,302,847 votes in the Senate, while the official results published on Friday by the Registrar’s Office, with 97% counted, they awarded it 2,692,999, that is, 390,152 more votes, being the party with the greatest difference between the two figures.
The projections show that with this result the Historical Pact can obtain 19 seats in the Upper House, three more than those obtained in the pre-count on Sunday and would subtract one seat from the Conservative Party, which would be left with 15; the ruling Democratic Center and the Alianza Verde-Centro Esperanza Coalition, which would drop to 13 each.
That has unleashed a controversy because precisely the Historical Pact has denounced since Monday that they had not counted nearly 500,000 votes, while the Democratic Center, which is Duque’s party, lamented the gap between the preliminary count and the vote count.
“The inclusion of 948,283 votes (from all parties) in the scrutiny phase overwhelms the variation between precount and scrutiny, which has historically been 0.5% and this time is more than 7%”, expressed the uribista party, which requested the total recount of the votes.
GUARANTEES TABLE
The Electoral Guarantees Table it is made up of the Registrar’s Office and the National Electoral Council, organizers of the elections, as well as the national government, the participating political parties and movements; the control organisms and the electoral observers.
“The idea is that once the explanations that exist on this matter have been assessed, measures can also be taken to prevent future similar situations. It is very important to bear in mind that today the electoral organization continues to advance in the counting process”Duque added about what will happen at Tuesday’s meeting.
(Historical Pact would obtain three more seats after counting votes).
The president also called on “good sense and address this discussion at the level of the institutions, so that the registrar (Alexander Vega) and the National Electoral Council explain point by point what those failures that occurred in some polling places could have been”.
“It is important to highlight that the scrutiny process is the process that gives total validity to what was expressed at the polls because it is a process that examines in detail not only the forms, but also compares them”Duke emphasized.
The main target of criticism for what happened is the registrar Vega, whose resignation is requested by representatives of various sectors of the Colombian political spectrum.
EFE
