Registrar presents new E-14 forms in atypical mayoral elections in Urrao

This Sunday, April 3, in the municipality of Urrao, Antioquia, the atypical elections were held and the citizens elected Osvaldo Sepúlveda Pérez as their mayor. Election Day also helped the National Registry of Civil Status to implement a pilot plan with a new way of filling out E-14 forms.

Ángela María Ochoa, delegate of the Registrar's Office in Antioquia, explained that voting juries should use two colors of pens to fill out the form: black to write the number of votes the candidate received and red for boxes that do not contain value, that is, to put the asterisks.

“The instruction given to the voting juries is that they must first fill out the form by filling in the spaces with numbers in black pen and then the empty spaces with the red asterisk; they must fill out the entire form E-14,” explained the Registrar's official. With this pilot plan, the entity hopes to be able to guarantee the transmission of data and the reading of the judges of the Republic in municipal ballots.

It should be remembered that this pilot plan was born after the controversy that was presented with the forms in the last elections to the Congress of the Republic. The irregularities that arose even came to the point of even considering a recount of the ballots, a decision which was withdrawn by Registrar Alexander Vega.

The newly elected mayor

Osvaldo Sepúlveda Pérez is the new mayor elected by Urrao after a day of voting in the municipality. The Registrar opened the polls at 8:00 in the morning and closed them at 4:00 in the afternoon and set up nine polling stations, four in the municipal seat and the other five in districts, and 55 tables for the conduct of atypical elections.

The entity indicated that a total of 24,805 citizens, of whom 12,240 are women and 12,565 are men, were authorized to exercise their right to vote in these atypical elections; however, 7,022 votes were registered after the final pre-count.

Sepúlveda Perez won 29.44% of the vote, that is, he won 2,067 ballots out of 7,022. The second largest number of ballots was obtained in a blank vote with 1,555 votes.

Álvaro Salazar, from the Grand Alliance for Unity coalition of Urrao, won second place with 1,393 votes (19.84%); Jaime Eduardo Urrego, from the Aico party, took third place with 829 supports; Sebastián Durango, from the Democratic Center, had 822 ballots, and Sergio Augusto Cardona, from Colombia Humana, received 157 votes.

For his part, the national registrar, Alexander Vega Rocha, assured that: “The democratic day passed completely normally and citizens arrived with peace of mind to the polls. All the tables scheduled for this day were set up and the voting juries attended and no incidents were reported.”

The reasons behind atypical choices

This is the third time that the citizens of Urrao have gone to the polls to elect a mayor. The situation began after the president-elect, Jhon Jairo Higuita Rueda, died on December 16, 2020 from covid-19.

Higuita had been hospitalized in Rionegro since the end of November, but lost the battle in the ICU before the start of the so-called second peak of the pandemic. For this reason, an atypical election day was held on February 21, 2021, in which Alexandra Machado Montoya, wife of the late mayor, was elected; however, the election was annulled six months later by the Administrative Court of Antioquia.

The court's decision was based just on this last detail. The Fifth Chamber argued that “whoever within the previous 12 months has had a marriage bond with anyone who, during the same period, held such authority in the same municipality cannot be elected as mayor.” Given this, the Government of Antioquia defined that the elections would be held on March 3.

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