Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro and data analysts presented evidence suggesting that President-elect Abelardo de la Espriella won the election through the mass manipulation of tally sheets.
During a two-hour presentation, Petro claimed that almost all tally sheets that had been shared with his political party, the Historic Pact “lacked the Hash security lock,” which is inserted into official PDF documents to guarantee they can’t be changed.
The absence of a hash file implies that the so-called E14 tally sheets may have been altered, which appears to have happened, according to data analysts who accompanied the president.
Legal expert William Villanueva said that original tally sheets were scanned and subsequently reprocessed, removing the metadata that would allow them to determine whether the E14’s were uploaded or introduced digitally.
“We found documents marked ‘confidential’… and others that said ‘not digitized’ on a blank page, which—and this is important—were later republished with different information,” said one of the computer scientists.
The investigation, which was carried out by 75,000 “digital witnesses,” found that 95 municipalities had more voters than inhabitants. In all of these municipalities, the E-14’s gave De la Espriella landslide victories with more than 70% of the votes.
The president-elect’s opponent, leftist Senator Ivan Cepeda, achieved not a single victory in hundreds of towns where the electoral census was larger than 85% of the population.
In 1,350 polling centers in capital cities, the researchers found that block patterns in which De la Espriella won the first half of the voting booths and Cepeda won the second half.
According to a consulted statistician, this result would only be probably in some 80 polling stations, said Carlos Oñoro, one of the digital witnesses.
“This order is mathematically impossible for human voters,” Petro stated, arguing that automated software replaced actual citizen ballots.
The findings of the digital witnesses will be added to a lawsuit that seeks to nullify the election of De la Espriella and force the Council of State to order a recount of the votes.
Following the presentation, Cepeda said in a post on social media network X that “the competent authority must impartially examine our demands of nullity.”
