National Registrar desists from requesting recount of votes for the Senate in Colombia

The National Registrar of ColombiaAlexander Vega, desisted this Tuesday from requesting the recount of the votes of the Senate elections on March 13, a decision that he blamed on the position of the majority of the parties to maintain the result of the scrutiny that has generated doubts.

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“I defend the scrutiny. The request that I made yesterday was to present it today and I have not presented any request. That was done with the purpose of finding a way out of this whole issue of legitimizing this result, which they were saying that (there was) fraud and fraud never existed,” Vega said.

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During a meeting of the National Commission for the Coordination and Follow-up of Electoral Processes, the registrar appreciated that the majority of parties advocated maintaining the results of the scrutiny that gave the left about 400,000 votes more than those initially announced on the day of the elections. elections.

In the meeting, called by President Iván Duque, 19 political movements participated; the Registrar’s Office and the National Electoral Council, organizers of the elections; as well as the national government; the control organisms and electoral observers.

However, not everyone agreed with Vega’s decision not to ask the Senate to recount the votes, which was opposed by the ruling Democratic Center party, led by former President Álvaro Uribe.

DEFENSE OF INSTITUTIONALITY

Parties such as the Liberal and the right-wing Cambio Radical and even the leftists Colombia Humana and Polo Democrático Alternativo (PDA) expressed their rejection of Vega’s initial proposal and assured that the institutions should be “surrounded.”

“I make a call to my colleagues and party leaders: we cannot set this country on fire, a call to ignore the results is a call to insurrection. Oh my God!. This cannot happen to us, we have to surround the institutions”, expressed the general secretary of Cambio Radical, Germán Córdoba.

Along the same lines, former senator Jaime Dussan, spokesman for the PDA, assessed that “the national registrar of Civil Status has changed his position and his request (…) has realized that his claim was not understood or he realized that this request was not appropriate” to recount the votes for the Senate.

POSITION OF URIBISM

Lawyer Hollman Ibáñez, who was one of the Uribe spokesmen at the meeting, criticized the “disconnection of the parties with reality” in the face of the overwhelming majority opposed to requesting a total recount of the votes.

It was asked that if 98% of the departmental scrutinizing commissions are closed, where are the political movements going to present their claims due to the doubts left by the counting process?

“That gives us the opportunity to ask for the general count of each and every one of the tables (…) There are enough tools for the general count to be done,” he said.

Senator Gustavo Petro, presidential candidate of the leftist Historical Pact and favorite to win the May 29 elections, assured Efe before Vega’s decision that he hoped the National Electoral Council (CNE) “would not fall into that trap” of accept a recount of votes.

“That the forces that were elected there by the mostly traditional Congress do not take the step to commit an outrage that would undoubtedly have unfortunate consequences for Colombian democracy,” Petro said.

Despite the fact that the greatest discrepancies have occurred with the vote for the Senate, there are also those with that of the House of Representatives, whose scrutiny the Registrar plans to publish this week.

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Source: Elcomercio

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