The NGO Electoral Observation Mission (MOE), which monitored last Sunday’s elections in Colombia, denounced this Thursday that there had been “clearly atypical behavior” in the counting of the votes that could have disadvantaged the leftist Historical Pact, which was the most voted force.
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The director of the EOM, Alejandra Barrios, assured in a press conference that there were “clearly atypical behaviors in the number of polling stations that did not receive votes from the Historical Pact”, since it has a much higher percentage of polling stations where it did not receive a single vote than the six other parties or coalitions that also achieved parliamentary representation.
However, Barrios assured that “it is completely premature to speak of electoral fraud”, since definitive information on the scrutiny must be available – what has been published so far is the pre-count, which is usually reliable – “in order to determine whether or not there was manipulation of the electoral results“.
The EOM does denounce that they have detected “multiple errors in the electoral records”, such as when filling out the voting registration forms, with incorrect sums and “even cases of manipulation” that have been publicly recognized and are being corrected in the final scrutiny of the Registry.
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But the biggest mistake, according to this NGO, which accompanied the electoral process and now the precountare the “atypical behavior” in the votes of the Historical Pact, which won 16 seats in the Senate (2.3 million votes) and 25 in the House of Representatives (2.5 million votes).
“The reasonable thing is that the more votes it has, the fewer voting tables will not find votes for a political organization.“, explained Barrios, but “these rules are not observed in a particular way in the Historical Pact”.
For the Historical Pact, in 25.6% of the polling stations “not a single vote was found”, while in the case of the Conservative Party (with 2.2 million votes, the second most voted) that percentage decreases to 3.4% and in the Liberal Party (third with 2 million votes) it is 3.1%. The Historical Pact is led by presidential candidate Gustavo Petro, who since Monday denounced these irregularities and even spoke of “electoral fraud.”
Petro assured that “486,000 votes have been recovered for the Historical Pact to the Senate that were not reported“, so they would be reaching three million votes in the Upper House. For his part, Alirio Uribe, elected by this party to the House of Representatives, pointed out that there are “539,473 votes that had not been counted” in this House, for what they would get “more than 20 seats”.
“What happened on March 13 is very serious,” said Uribe on Thursday, who pointed out that a form to fill in the number of votes “was poorly done and generated confusion.”
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RESPONSE OF THE REGISTRAR
The Registrar reported today that the definitive scrutiny for the country is 90.86% in the Senateby 90.79% in the House of Representatives and 95.81% in the Special Transitory Districts of Peace (CITREP) where the 16 seats for victims of the conflict were elected.
When 100% of the scrutinized polling stations are reached, a public report will be rendered, and the candidates, electoral witnesses or proxies will be able to claim in writing before the National Electoral Council (CNE) in the foreseen cases, such as when there are arithmetic errors in the sum of the votes or when faced with the scrutiny of the juries, added the Registry.
For his part, the National Registrar, Alexander Vegatold El Tiempo that the candidates who were elected in the popular consultations will have a period of five days, after they are notified, to register with their vice-presidential formula.
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In this sense, only until this Friday, March 18, will the official results of the inter-party consultations be known. Vega, likewise, said that the results of the pre-count are only informative and that is why the results of the E14 forms were published so that the candidates could see the results.
BRIEFCASE
With information from EFE*
