Juan Rulfo imagined a village where the dead keep talking because no one told them everything was over. In Comala, voices circulate, orders are carried out, the land obeys a power that no longer exists in any material sense. Colombia held its presidential run-off on 21 June 2026 with record turnout, more than twenty-five million votes cast, long queues at Corferias and in Caribbean towns where the sun crushes at four in the afternoon. And yet nobody knows exactly who won. The Registraduría’s preliminary count attributes a lead of 247,000 votes to far-right lawyer Abelardo de la Espriella over left-wing senator Iván Cepeda. The official count, the only one with legal validity, has not yet concluded. In the meantime, President Gustavo Petro has denounced the manipulation of 122,000 electoral forms, accused the State of Israel of breaching the Registraduría’s servers, and called tens of thousands of lawyers to mobilise towards counting centres across the country. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has already congratulated the winner.
The Electoral Machine as Permanent Infrastructure
Before discussing digital fraud or foreign interference, it is worth recalling what was already documented before a single ballot box was opened. Between January and March 2026, during the legislative elections and the consultations preceding the first round, Colombian security forces seized more than 3.8 billion pesos in 56 operations linked to vote-buying. The money circulated in bundles inside private vehicles, in bags on secondary roads, in body straps worn by individuals travelling between municipalities in Urabá, La Guajira and the Caribbean. These were not individual or improvised transactions. They were logistical chains with their own geography, established routes and identifiable actors.
The names appearing in the files are always the same. The Trujillo, Chagüi and Correa Villarreal clans, structures with decades of territorial implantation in Córdoba, Sucre and the north coast, served as distribution nodes. Cundinamarca registered the largest seizures, over 630 million pesos in Bogotá, followed by 434 million in Montería; Antioquia dispersed the flow between Apartadó, Puerto Triunfo and La Pintada, totalling more than 600 million. The Electoral Observation Mission recorded that 28.7% of citizen reports on 21 June referred to pressure on communities and money handed over in exchange for votes, verified in some cases through demands for photographs of completed ballots.
What these figures describe is not an anomaly of the Colombian system. It is its operating mode under low supervision. Vote-buying requires no conspiracy, only a network, a budget and the accumulated certainty that the system has neither the will nor the means to dismantle it. The arrests are real. So are the releases. The cycle repeats.
The Software and Its Private Custodians
The E-14 form is the document assessors fill in at each table at the close of voting; it records votes by candidacy, blank ballots, null ballots and unmarked cards. In 2026, that document became the terrain of a dispute that remains unresolved.
From February, President Petro had publicly warned of the risks posed by the electoral software managed by Thomas Greg & Sons, a private company administering the State’s electoral databases. He also noted that the system lacked the traceability mechanisms that had guaranteed data integrity in 2022, specifically the timestamp and the hash lock, tools that verify whether a form has been altered after upload. He requested a technical audit before the first round. National Registrar Hernán Penagos did not authorise it.
On 21 June, during the preliminary count, Petro published on X what he described as evidence of E-14 modifications “on an industrial scale”, with a comparison between the 2022 and 2026 documents showing, according to the president, a “total obscuring” of identification data. He requested a review of 122,000 records and an expert audit of the software within the official count process. The Electoral Observation Mission classified several verified cases as disinformation. Neither position has been supported by independent technical verification with the rigour the case demands.
“I warned that the Bautista brothers’ software was vulnerable according to the Council of State’s 2018 ruling and that it should be replaced by public software. I requested an expert audit of the Bautista brothers’ software in good time, and the Registrar did not allow it.” (Gustavo Petro, X, 21 June 2026)
What can be affirmed is the structure of the problem. Colombia delegates its electoral infrastructure to a private company, without the audit mechanisms its own Council of State deemed necessary in 2018, and without a public integrity verification protocol available to parties and citizens. That vulnerability predates 21 June and will outlive it.
A State Without the Instruments to Know
On the night of 21 June, Petro went further than any Colombian head of state before him. He claimed to possess evidence of a change in the IP addresses of several Registraduría servers, which would have allowed external actors to write data onto tables and polling stations. He named a culprit. “The only one in the world capable of doing that is the State of Israel.” The accusation, without independently verified expert evidence at the time of writing, can be neither confirmed nor refuted by Colombian institutions. That is the point.
Colombia does not have the mechanisms to answer that question. The traceability instruments that would have allowed tracking of modifications to electoral servers are no longer active. The technical audit Petro requested before the first round was refused. No electoral cybersecurity protocol exists with defined deadlines and responsible parties. If an external actor did intervene on the Registraduría’s servers, the Colombian State cannot prove it. And if no such intervention took place, it cannot disprove it either. The accusation remains suspended through lack of technical infrastructure, not lack of relevance.
A verifiable fact completes the picture. Colombia had severed diplomatic relations with Israel in 2024, and Chancellor Gideon Sa’ar congratulated De la Espriella that same Sunday. The coincidence is not evidence. It forms part of the factual record that the official count has no mandate to examine.
Washington Congratulates First
Marco Rubio did not wait for the count. The Secretary of State of the Trump administration published his congratulations to De la Espriella on the very day of the vote, before the formal verification process had begun, with a message centred on three priorities, regional security cooperation, control of migration to the United States and strengthening of bilateral economic ties. President Donald Trump noted, in a subsequent communication, that he had supported the candidate since he occupied tenth place in the polls.
Washington’s posture towards the allegations has been silence. No State Department statement on the 122,000 disputed forms, no mention of the server accusation, no reference to the 3.8 billion pesos seized in vote-buying operations. What exists is the early congratulation, the promise of closer relations and Trump’s direct communication with the preliminary count winner. For Washington, the Colombian election ended Sunday night.
This speed is not neutral. It is a message to Colombian institutions about which result has international backing. In a country where institutional credibility depends in part on external validation, that message carries material weight. The judges and notaries conducting the count know which candidate has the White House’s support. That knowledge does not determine their conduct, but forms part of the environment in which they act.
The Lawyers and the Lock
Iván Cepeda announced 57,189 formal challenges relating to the 21 June voting day, the largest number of objections ever submitted in a Colombian presidential election. To manage them, the Pacto Histórico mobilised tens of thousands of lawyers to counting centres across the country. Petro publicly called on them to head to Corferias. What the lawyers found on arrival was a system designed to process, not to investigate.
The Electoral Code sets out exhaustively the grounds permitting a table to be opened or a datum corrected, arithmetic errors, crossed-out entries, missing signatures, votes exceeding the registered electorate. Outside these grounds, there is no recourse. CNE president magistrate Cristian Quiroz stated it without ambiguity
“It is not up to the free discretion of lawyers or witnesses. What can be claimed is defined exhaustively by law.” (Cristian Quiroz, CNE president, 22 June 2026)
The system is preclusive; stages that close cannot be reopened at the will of the competitors. For Cepeda to reverse the preliminary count result, the variation would need to be more than ten times greater than any difference historically recorded in a presidential election. Specialists consider it possible in the abstract, without verifiable precedent. The legal device does not prevent challenges; it processes and rejects them when they fail to meet formal requirements. Its real function is not to guarantee that all irregularities are investigated, but to guarantee a conclusion within constitutional deadlines. The difference between those two functions is the difference between a democratic institution and a legitimisation machine. Colombia has the latter.
No Official Result in Comala
On 23 June 2026, Colombia has no official president. It has a preliminary count attributing 247,000 votes of lead to a candidate Washington and Tel Aviv are already treating as president-elect. It has an official count with 57,189 pending challenges the system deems insufficient to reverse the result. It has an accusation of foreign interference no institution can confirm or refute. It has 3.8 billion pesos seized in vote-buying operations that generated no consequence for the validity of the elections.
Rulfo did not need to invent fraud. It was enough to imagine a village where authority persisted after the death of power, where orders continued because no one had given the counter-order. In Colombia, the preliminary count carries no legal validity. The official count has not concluded. No one will investigate the server IP changes with the timelines and resources that an accusation of this magnitude requires. No one will reopen the debate on Thomas Greg & Sons’ software. The money seized in Montería represents a fraction of what circulated. The process will have functioned within the constitutional framework, with the MOE deployed, witnesses accredited, judges signing the records. And in the end, what will remain is not a verified result but the certainty that the apparatus designed to record the popular will was not equipped to do so, and that no one had instructions to try…
G.S.
Sources
- Petro denounces irregularities in 122,000 E-14 forms
- First MOE report · Second round 21 June 2026
- Crossed-out E-14 forms do not prove fraud · El Filtro, El Tiempo
- Petro accuses Israel of breaching electoral software · Milenio
- Petro denounces Israeli hacking · Pulzo
- Petro accuses Israel · The Jerusalem Post
- CNE · 2026 count process
- Frequently asked questions on the official count · La Silla Vacía
- Vote-buying · El Colombiano
- Thomas Greg & Sons software · Infobae
- Colombian electoral system · CELAG
- Cepeda files 57,000 challenges · El Tiempo
- Pedro Páramo · Juan Rulfo, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1955
