The scrutiny of the first round of Sunday’s presidential elections in Colombia captures the country’s attention after the questions made without evidence by President Gustavo Petro to the preliminary count released by the National Registry.
With 100% of the polling stations informed, this preliminary count from the Registrar’s Office, the entity in charge of organizing the elections, showed that the far-right lawyer Abelardo de la Espriella obtained 10.3 million votes (43.74%) and the leftist senator Iván Cepeda reached 9.6 million (40.90%).
As neither exceeded the threshold of half plus one of the valid votes required to win in the first round, both will face each other in a second election on June 21.
The leftist candidate, Cepeda, has acknowledged in recent hours that no evidence of irregularities in the electoral process has been found. After carrying out the pertinent checks, he has discarded the doubts raised by the current president, Gustavo Petro, who pointed out that “800,000 additional people” had been added to the count. “We have proceeded to carry out the verifications and so far, I have to say that at this time we have not found evidence of facts of a dimension or depth that deserve a statement on possible irregularities,” said the candidate of the Historical Pact, in a press conference in Bogotá.
These are the keys to understanding the controversy and the process in which the vote count will officially determine the result of the first round and define any claims about the vote.
1. What is scrutiny
The pre-count, which is done manually, is a projection of the vote after the polls close, but its results have no legal validity because its function is merely informative and preliminary in nature.
The official results arise from the scrutiny, a technical and legal procedure through which the electoral authorities review the voting records, consolidate the figures and study any claims presented by campaigns, parties and electoral witnesses.
This task is carried out by scrutiny commissions made up mainly of judges of the Republic and notaries, designated to review electoral documents and resolve controversies about the vote.
The process begins on the same day of the elections at the municipal level, continues with the scrutiny at the regional level and culminates in the National Electoral Council (CNE), whose full chamber consolidates the entire country and officially declares the result of the presidential election.
2. Petro’s doubts
On Sunday, Petro questioned the preliminary results and assured that there were irregularities related to the electoral software and differences between the official electoral roll and the databases used for the count, as well as tables in which, he said, votes were supposedly added.
These complaints are added to previous warnings made by the president about the electoral process, during which he expressed doubts about the guarantees of the election and the possibility of fraud, although without presenting evidence to support these claims.
Cepeda initially supported these claims, but this Monday he distanced himself from the president by ensuring that he has no evidence of such irregularities.
“We have proceeded to carry out the verifications and until now, I have to say, that we have not found evidence at this time about facts of a dimension or depth that deserve a statement about possible irregularities,” he said.
3. Trust in the system
The scrutiny can modify the preliminary figures released on election night, but the variations are usually minimal in presidential elections. In fact, in the first round of 2022 the difference between the pre-count and the scrutiny was only 0.1%.
Colombia has a long tradition of transparent elections and an electoral system supported by institutions and that is why controversies are usually processed through the mechanisms provided for by law.
In this context, allegations of fraud have been rare in the country’s recent history and have rarely called into question the legitimacy of the results.
The most notable exception was the 1970 presidential election, when General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla denounced irregularities after losing to the conservative Misael Pastrana, an episode that ended up giving rise to the creation of the M-19, the guerrilla in which Petro participated in his youth.
