Colombia’s outgoing president sowed doubt Sunday about his country’s elections, which showed his preferred candidate, Iván Cepeda, headed to a runoff next month against right-wing opponent Abelardo de la Espriella.Subscribe to read this story ad-free Get unlimited access to ad-free articles and exclusive content.Neither candidate had more than 50% of the vote in the first round of the election Sunday.With 100% of votes tallied, de la Espriella — running as a candidate for Defensores de la Patria, a party he founded — was leading with more than 43% of the vote.
Cepeda, of the incumbent party, Pacto Histórico, was trailing at just over 40%.President Gustavo Petro, who endorsed Cepeda, said he would not accept the preliminary count released by the country’s electoral authority, claiming that some of the software private companies used to count votes was flawed and that the results were not binding.Petro claimed 800,000 IDs were added to the software, representing people who were not on the official census.Cepeda, too, sowed doubt about the results, saying that votes were miscounted and that there were discrepancies.Sen.
Ivan Cepeda, a Petro ally and candidate from the incumbent Pacto Histórico party, outside a polling station in Bogota on Saturday.Raul Arboleda / AFP via Getty Images“Today, we secured 10 million votes that were miscounted in Colombia,” Cepeda said in a speech in Bogotá.“There is a discrepancy that we wish to verify.”The country’s electoral body, the National Civil Registry, reveals preliminary results in advance of final, official results.
The chief of the office, Hernán Penagos, said in March that the preliminary count of this year’s congressional elections reached 99.8% precision — a historic high — compared with the final results.Juanita Goebertus, the Americas director of Human Rights Watch, said Sunday on X that Colombia’s electoral system was “independent and trustworthy.”“It is regrettable that the pr...