They present guardianship to investigate the faults of registrar Alexander Vega during the congressional elections

This Monday, the Electoral Oversight Alliance held a press conference in which it presented an account of the irregularities that occurred in the last elections to the Congress of the Republic, on March 13. The organizations asked the high courts to replace the National Registrar, Alexander Vega, for the presidential elections and to appoint an ad hoc registrar that would favor the legitimacy of the process.

Three organizations are part of the alliance: the Peace and Reconciliation Foundation (Pares), the Open Policy Extituto and the Anti-Corruption Institute, which collected a series of evidence in a 40-page document that would demonstrate irregularities in the elections and certain failures of the Registry Office.

“We call and alert to request guarantees for the electoral process,” said Esteban Salazar, coordinator of democracy and governance of Pares. We have seen that because of Registrar Alexander Vega, the legal certainty of the elections as well as institutional trust has been put at risk.”

Salazar pointed out that the registrar “should have some investigations of a preventive nature” by the Office of the Prosecutor, the Attorney General's Office and the Control Office. That is why the alliance filed a guardianship action containing the evidence collected and they expect a judge of the Republic to order the supervisory bodies to initiate an investigation process against Vega.

The three serious faults of the registrar

The organizations also filed a disciplinary complaint about the alleged commission of three serious misconduct by Alexander Vega. The first is due to an “overreach of its functions by requesting a general recount that has no place in the current regulations”, according to the official of Pares.

The second has to do with an omission in their functions in the planning process at the contractual level, which were reflected in the processes of registration of ballots, biometric identification and the selection of juries.

“It is a disaster, to begin with, that difficulties or irregularities have been recognized by the registrar at 23,000 of the 112,000 voting stations,” the alliance said at the press conference. He also highlighted the errors in the design of electoral material, such as E-14 forms, training and counting, and the difficulties on the Registrar's website that prevented the free exercise of the right to vote for 800,000 citizens.

The third relates to “mismanagement within the judicial investigations process” because of the registrar's statements about alleged attacks by international hackers. “At this time the same Prosecutor's Office has established that they have not happened,” said Salazar.

The director of Pares, León Valencia, noted that the situation “is so dramatic that there would be the possibility that the courts would consider the possibility of an ad hoc registrar, at least for these two electoral events,” referring to the first and second rounds of the presidential elections. “It would be a very strong message, not to leave it to the registrar's will, because many people have asked him to resign, but in Colombia nobody quits in the biggest scandals,” he added.

Changes to Form E-14

Given the controversy that arose over Form E-14 during the elections, the registrar announced changes to the document. The goal of the redesign is to “avoid any mistakes”, so it will also have larger squares and will be colored.

In fact, on April 3, a pilot plan was carried out in the atypical mayoral elections in Urrao, Antioquia. 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.

This is not the only change that will take place for the next presidential election. Vega indicated that, in order to avoid problems with information in the transmission of information, “there will be real-time control over everything that is transmitted that Sunday” and there will be new voting juries for the presidential elections, who will receive more in-depth training.

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