Colombia Announces Significantly Revised Senate Election Results

Colombia’s National Register announced drastically revised election results on Friday.
The revision follows a review of the Senate election results that were originally announced on Sunday.
The “Historical Pact”, the opposition party of progressive senator Gustavo Petro, had called for scrutiny of the votes.
Progressives will have 19 Senate seats in the next legislature, according to the National Register.
The Historic Pact won only 16 seats after the preliminary vote count.
The counting of 97% of the ballot boxes gave 390,000 votes for the progressives who had been excluded from the preliminary count.
The poll revealed that the vote counts of almost all parties had been inflated in the preliminary results.
President Ivan Duque’s far-right Democratic Center party lost a seat to the Historic Pact in the review.
The Conservative Party and the Center Hope Coalition also ceded a seat to the Progressives.
Independent observers said the historic Pact’s low vote count was largely due to a “design flaw” on the Senate ballot.
The results of the polls for the House of Representatives elections are expected in the coming days.
The review failed to dispel doubts about the election results and the competence of the National Registrar Alexander Vega.
Parties that did not reach the threshold in the elections continued to call on their supporters to revise the election results, which would allow them to demand a recount.
Green Alliance party officials reiterated that they expect Vega to resign and an ad hoc clerk to be appointed before the presidential election in May.
The Democratic Center also called Vega’s handling of the election “inconvenient.”