Colombia’s registrar general said Tuesday four million deceased Colombians have been removed from the official voter register, reported newspaper El Tiempo.
“We are pleased that the deceased have been purged [from the registry] and I can now say, with certainty, that the [current] records … do not contain dead people in the electoral roll,” Colombia’s Registrar General Carlos Ariel Sanchez explained.
Sanchez also said that his office had been concerned with the number of deaths that appeared on the candidate lists that were registered by firms. “Possibly, they used databases from before 2006, which are the lists that were on the market,” Sanchez suggested.
In early 2011, the registry removed the names of 800,000 deceased people to help create more transparency in the voting process for the October local elections. In August the Electoral Census of the Registry removed two mayoral candidates who registered for the October elections using the signatures of prisoners, dead people, and thousands of non-existent voters.
However, finally in September the National Registry was able to completely update the country’s registers to prevent people fraudulently voting on behalf of the deceased in the upcoming October elections.
