The Polo Democratico candidates will be cheated in the upcoming elections on Sunday, October 30 unless measures are taken to combat fraud, the party said Thursday.
Speaking for the Polo Democratico Alternativo (PDA) Party, the chief opposition to President Juan Manual Santos’ government coalition, Senator Jorge Robledo argued that “everything is sung” for fraud against the Polo.
“The Polo has no control mechanisms that may be able to prevent them from stealing all the votes they want from us, we cannot, we have nothing,” El Espectador reported the senator said.
The president of the party, Jaime Dussan, has requested an emergency meeting with Colombia’s Prosecutor General Viviane Morales and Inspector General Alejandro Ordoñez to “assess the situation and decide to avoid muddying the electoral process on October 30.”
According to RCN Radio, Dussan requested that the meeting be overseen by the Organization of American States (OAS) and the Electoral Observation Mission (MOE).
In a letter to the country’s National Registrar Carlos Ariel Sanchez and the Ministry of the Interior, Dussan made several requests concerning the “bias and questionable conduct of some of the officials in some of the departments and municipalities’ registries.
“We ask that delegates from the departments of Magdalena, Atlantico, Valle, Nariño, Tolima, Cesar and the municipalities of Cali, Santa Marta, Barranquilla, Pasto, Ibague, Cienaga and Flanders are transferred or watched, given that the leaders of the Polo Democratico in these regions have found leanings towards particular candidates,” the party president said.
Electoral observers at MOE estimated in an August report that the 2011 local elections will see a 67% rise in irregularities from the last local elections, in 2007.
The MOE report registered 544 municipalities at risk of fraud, as opposed to 328 in 2007 and suggested that, unlike in the previous election, most of the fraud is not linked to armed groups but to politicians from mainstream political parties.