Colombia’s President Juan Manuel Santos asked Tuesday for an investigation into possible electoral fraud in Sunday’s Valle del Cauca’s governor.
“There have been many allegations of possible fraud.” Santos said, referring to the Liberal Party’s accusation that their candidate had been cheated out of the governorship. “In that sense, what we do is to call the Registar where it originated, and if this the case, do the count again for the people to remain calm and stay reassured that the election was fair, transparent, and the candidate that received the most votes effectively won.”
According to the president, security forces have been ordered to prevent any violence from breaking out during the re-count and surrounding controversy.
“I gave clear and forceful instructions to the security forces, not only the police but also to the Army there, fortunately there were very few populations that have presented incidents of violence, but this we are not going to permit,” he said.
“The last information I received from the Armed Forces is that it’s all controlled, but we will also take preventative measures if anyone wants to resort to violence, they will find the strength of out forces,” Santos added. “We will not permit bad losers to turn our democracy and our country bad, just because they lost the elections.”
The Liberal Party in Valle del Cauca requested the recount after their candidate for governor lost by less than 1% of the votes to a candidate with alleged ties to paramilitaries. With 98.40% of the votes counted, Liberal Party candidate Jorge Homero Giraldo received 32.62%, while Hector Fabio Useche from the “Inclusion and Opportunities Movement” received 33.02%.
“We fear that Valle del Cauca was happening the same as in the last elections of Congress, when they reported surprising and inexplicable results, so we will ask they recount vote by vote,” said the head of the Liberal Party.
Colombia‘s national registrar Wednesday requested more election officials from the Superior Council of the Judiciary to recount the votes.