The president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, has reiterated this Monday that he does not accept the results of the elections held on Sunday, denouncing a serious lack of transparency in the count and the manipulation of "many" scrutiny forms by the jurors, the well-known E-14 forms.
In a broad message disseminated on his social networks, Petro has maintained that there is evidence that these forms were fraudulently modified. He recalled that before the first round he had already requested the authorities for a "technical audit of the software" and that, for the second round, he also asked to recover the digital fingerprint of said documents to ensure that they could not be altered.
According to his account, these requests were not only ignored by the registrar Hernán Penagos and the attorney general, Gregorio Eljach, but, he assures, they were answered with personal disqualifications, calling him "crazy and anti-democratic." "As if electoral transparency were the business of violent people who want to set the country on fire," he added.
"What sets fire is the lack of electoral transparency (...) This is already a criminal matter, a crime against the vote," warned the president, who backs his accusations with a video in which, he claims, "premeditated" changes made "from the offices of the Bautista brothers" are evident, referring to the company Thomas Greg & Sons, responsible for a large part of the electoral logistics.
"They thought we were stupid and forgot that with us is the citizenry of the 21st century and not of the 19th century, in which the Registry Office is still cheating for political friends for money, but did not think that this practice would lead to the total loss of national sovereignty," Petro stressed.
The president has requested a digital review of 122,000 E-14 forms and has brought up a ruling by the Council of State from 2018 that already warned that "the software of the Bautista brothers (...) is vulnerable to internal and external actions against the vote."
"They thought that national sovereignty was a game for leftists and that is the foundation of a nation," he stated, holding the registrar Penagos responsible for having caused "a great wound in the deep heart of Colombia and a damage that history will not erase."
In this vein, Petro has insisted on the urgency of a "national agreement" that contemplates a profound reform of the Colombian electoral system, in order to ensure "transparency and sovereignty" in the upcoming elections. "The rest is betraying the initial idea for which the republic was founded," he stressed.
Hours later, the head of state also announced on his social media that he will "present the algorithms that make the Bautista brothers' software vulnerable and that allow powerful states with computational capacity to replace Colombians."
He also lamented that "since the software was not allowed to be audited, this terrible vulnerability was not discovered, and a possible... pyrrhic defeat of progressivism was preferred in exchange for national sovereignty." "Pyrrhic because progressivism is now greater than when the people elected me, which shows great gratitude and recognition from the people of Colombia who have not taken away my power of speech but rather more power," he stated.
In the same message, Petro invited his US counterpart, Donald Trump, "to talk because to the situation created in Peru, Colombia, and Venezuela, I believe we need to apply a lot of wisdom before provoking instability that would have a lot of human blood and an empowerment of drug trafficking like never before."
The president also denounced that "millions of dollars from abroad were invested in discrediting the government, me, the Historical Pact, and Iván Cepeda; which made millions of Colombians believe that Iván was a guerrilla fighter when he never took up a weapon, and only investigated the assassination of his senator father until he knew the official perpetrator and public official, and that led him, like me, (...) to investigate the culprits of the genocide of the humble people of Colombia."
For his part, the Attorney General, Gregorio Eljach, defended before the media that "in none" of the processes of the "last electoral calendar in Colombia has any fraud, any manifestation of tampering, any fact that contradicts or tarnishes the cleanliness and purity of the electoral process" been proven, demonstrated, or occurred with the force of judicial evidence.
In this context, Eljach urged "whoever alleges" irregularities in the presidential elections to "prove it in the corresponding instances, and surely their evidence will have to be considered by the scrutiny judges or by the contentious judges."
According to preliminary data, opposition candidate Abelardo de la Espriella would have won the second round of the presidential election with 49.6% of the votes, a lead of just 250,000 votes over the continuist aspirant of Petro, Iván Cepeda, who has described this preliminary count as "unofficial" and has announced that at least 33,000 polling stations will be challenged.