MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Early escrutinio stages confirm Colombia's preliminary result with 99.997% coincidence

Those figures must be confirmed or adjusted by the count process

Colombia's National Registry reported on Tuesday that there is a 99.997% coincidence between the preliminary results of Sunday's presidential runoff, which gave the victory to Abelardo de la Espriella, and the municipal counts, one of the stages of the process that will lead to the official declaration of the new president. “The preliminary count coincides with the judges' tally by 99.997%,” the body said in a statement.

The Registry held that the figure “ratifies that the preliminary vote count had efficient levels of accuracy, which guarantees the efficiency and transparency of this tool as part of the Colombian electoral system.” According to the preliminary count released on Sunday, De la Espriella obtained close to 12.9 million votes (49.66%), against some 12.7 million (48.70%) for left-wing candidate Iván Cepeda, in the closest election in the country's recent history.

Those figures must be confirmed or adjusted by the count process, which consists of four stages. The first corresponds to the count by polling-station jurors at the close of voting; the second, to the municipal counts carried out by judges and notaries, the phase to which the Registry referred. According to the body, close to 9,000 judges and notaries, spread across 2,992 counting commissions, completed that task in the last few hours.

The third stage is the departmental counts and the fourth, the national count, which takes place in a hearing that opened on Tuesday in Bogotá. At that stage, the magistrates of the National Electoral Council (CNE) resolve the challenges that were not settled in the previous phases and review the tally sheets from the 32 departments and from the votes of Colombians living abroad, consolidated through the tally sheets drawn up by the consulates.

The president of the CNE, Cristián Quiroz, specified that the process is “preclusive,” meaning that challenges not filed in due time in the early stages cannot be raised at the national hearing. The official, however, avoided setting an exact date to declare the winner between De la Espriella and Cepeda. The coincidence between the preliminary count and the judicial tally reinforces the solidity of the preliminary result, pending the official declaration. De la Espriella, who won with the electoral backing of US President Donald Trump, is to take office on August 7, in place of Gustavo Petro.