Registrar confirmed that more than one million votes appeared in the pre-count of congressional elections

The difference in votes between the pre-counting and the counting of the legislative elections and inter-party consultations held on March 13 in Colombia was widened, according to the national civil status registrar, Alexander Vega.

The figure is one million votes, among which are the 500,000 that the Historical Pact reached, and another 500,000 more for different political movements, the official said.

The official indicated that there are about 1′026,000 votes — a figure that, he said, may vary between pre-counting and counting — so the distribution of this amount among the other communities and candidates for the Senate of the Republic should be expected.

However, the difference between pre-counting and counting is 1 and 2 per cent, but for these legislatures it reached a difference of more than 7%.

In addition to this controversial fact, the official referred to complaints about forms poorly filled out by officials at the polling stations:

“It was corroborated that 23,000 forms were poorly filled out by the voting juries. In addition, we found that, in 5,109 tables, a possible malice is demonstrated, because in addition to filling out the forms in the wrong way, the votes of the candidates were crossed out,” Vega replied to criticism of irregularities reported in various media outlets.

The registrar, severely questioned by his performance in the final phase of the legislative elections, and who will face an investigation by the Attorney General's Office, denounced that he has an evidentiary stock of photographs of the completed forms showing scratches and crosses, as well as some votes completely wrinkled.

“We have already fully identified the jurors, but here we show the intention, not only in the bad diligence, but once they recorded the votes of the candidates, they crossed out the figures, so the witnesses pressured the jurors to put asterisks and crosses out on all the blank boxes. They were witnesses to all the campaigns,” Vega said when asked for evidence regarding allegations of alleged electoral fraud in the March legislatures.

MOE asks the Registrar's Office to explain inconsistencies in vote counting

The Electoral Observation Mission (MOE) asked the National Civil Status Registry to provide clear and sufficient explanations regarding the inconsistencies that arose in the process of pre-counting the legislative elections of March 13. He also asked citizens and political organizations to continue to monitor the counting process with “special attention and peace of mind”.

The analysis of the pre-counting results and the development of the scrutiny carried out by the EOM showed a pattern of inconsistencies in the transmission of information. According to the organization, this situation affected “the results of the pre-count of the Congress of the Republic, both of the Senate and the House of Representatives”.

In the review for the Senate, the EOM evidenced a few weeks ago that, “the results of the pre-count were not consistent, neither with the information contained in the E-14 forms, nor with the processing of results that is being carried out in the counting committees.”

In fact, faced with the irregularities that arose with the Historical Pact, the director of the EOM, Alejandra Barrios, pointed out that there was “atypical behavior” with these votes. The organization requested verification of 28,466 tables in which the coalition had no votes.

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