***** COLOMBIA RESULTS *****

[rabs]

Starting this thread, the other one is too long.

-----------------------------------

Very early official results (45 minutes after polls closed.)

Santos 1,049, 412

Mockus 490,761

Petro 228,797

Very wierd early results --- go against all polls.

Mockus won in Australia, France, Brazil, Japan, China, Singapore, Argentina.

[naaman fletcher]

1. for all we know..

these are from a pro-Santos region. Let's keep fingers crossed.

[Judi Lynn]

2. Oh, boy! Well, if there's going to be vote fraud we certainly know on whose behalf it will happen.

The regime's chokehold is very firm on the people of Colombia. As a reminder:

Mark Him on the Ballot - The One Wearing Glasses"
By Constanza Vieira

BOGOTA, May 8 , 2008 (IPS) - "With Uribe, we thought: this is the guy who is going to change the country," the 41-year-old fisherwoman told IPS.

That is why her fishing and farming village of 800 people in the central Colombian region of Magdalena Medio decided overwhelmingly to vote for current President Álvaro Uribe in the 2002 presidential elections, when he first ran.

The woman agreed to talk to IPS on the condition that she be asked neither her name (we will call her "L.") nor the name of her village.

The main city in the fertile region of Magdalena Medio is Barrancabermeja, an oil port on the Magdalena River, which runs across Colombia from south to north before emptying into the Caribbean Sea.

What convinced the villagers to vote for Uribe? "Because the region where we live is poor, very poor, it’s so difficult to find work, and when I heard him say ‘I am going to work for the poor, I am going to help them,’ I thought ‘this is a good president’."

When the rightwing president’s first four-year term came to an end in 2006, most of the villagers decided again to vote for him, reasoning that he just needed more time to reduce poverty.

The odd thing was that in both the 2002 and 2006 elections, despite the fact that the villagers had already decided to vote for Uribe, the far-right paramilitaries, who had committed a number of murders since 1998, when they appeared in the region that was previously dominated by the leftwing guerrillas, pressured the local residents to vote for Uribe anyway.

The paramilitaries did not kill people to pressure the rest to vote for Uribe, as they did in other communities, but merely used "threats," said L.

"If you don't vote for Uribe, you know what the consequences will be," the villagers were told ominously.

And on election day, they breathed down voters’ necks: "This is the candidate you’re going to vote for. You’re going to put your mark by this one. The one wearing glasses," they would say, pointing to Uribe’s photo on the ballot, L. recalled.

"One (of the paramilitaries) was on the precinct board, another one was standing next to the table, and another was a little way off, all of them watching to see if you voted for Uribe," she added, referring to the less than subtle way that the death squads commanded by drug traffickers and allies of the army ensured that L.’s village voted en masse for the current president in both elections.

More:
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=42290

Recommending.

[rabs]

4. Looks like It's going to a second round

Santos is hovering around 46 percent, mockus around 21 percent.

What is really strange is that in less than an hour an a half almost all the results are done. (91 percent counted !!)

Fyi there was a mysterious episode on Friday. JM Santos had a luncheon with the president of the workers' of the Registeria Nacional, which is in charge of the vote counting. It was at a well-known Argentina restaurant in Bogota called "El Dia que me Quieres."

The other candidates want to know what transpired between Santos and the union president, just two days before the election.

So the polls were totally wrong, according to the results !!!!

One friend said that Santos and uribistas may have OVERDONE the fraud.

[Judi Lynn]

5. Wow! I remember you said during the week they had already claimed they would be know very quickly

who had won. The time element they claimed would be suffiencient to tally the votes was extremely small, and I wondered about it then, as in "how can they possibly manage it that fast?"

Now hearing Santos had a personal meeting with the Registeria Nacional's president, it explains it will be necessary to assume there's funny business. That's just not above board, not kosher. It's almost a promise he expects to win.

Maybe he used the time to remind the guy there will be no place on earth he can hide to avoid getting murdered by the paras, should he NOT cooperate in handing the large win to Santos.

Absolutely contrary to what has been determined by the polls.

[Judi Lynn]

3. Santos takes early lead in Colombia election

Santos takes early lead in Colombia election

(Reuters) - Former Colombian Defence Minister Juan Manuel Santos took an early lead in the first round of a presidential election against former Bogota Mayor Antanas Mockus, according to preliminary results on Sunday.

Santos led with 47.7 percent of the votes and Mockus had 22.3 percent with 6.29 percent of polling stations counted, according to electoral authorities.

Opinion polls had shown neither front-running candidate would win the more than 50 percent of votes needed to clinch outright victory in Sunday's election and they may face a June runoff to succeed President Alvaro Uribe.

A staunch Washington ally, Uribe steps down still popular after two terms dominated by his war against drug-trafficking rebels, and his pro-business approach that attracted a flood of foreign investment especially in oil and mining.

Santos, a U.S.- and British-educated economist, led early campaigning, but Mockus, the son of Lithuanian immigrants who is also a former university professor, surged with a Green Party campaign against graft and "politics as usual."

More:
http://uk.reuters.com/article/idUKTRE64T2DO20100530?rpc=401&feedType=RSS&feedName=worldNews&rpc=401

Keeping those fingers crossed tonight!

[Judi Lynn]

6. Colombia Ex-Defense Minister Leads Pres. Vote

BOGOTA, Colombia, May 30, 2010
Colombia Ex-Defense Minister Leads Pres. Vote
Promising to Build on President Uribe's Security Gains, Juan Manuel Santos Has Commanding Lead

(AP) A former defense minister promising to build on President Alvaro Uribe's security gains took a commanding lead Sunday in Colombia's presidential elections.

But a runoff appeared likely.

With 49 percent of the votes counted, Juan Manuel Santos had 47 percent against 21 percent for Antanas Mockus, a maverick outsider who pledged clean government and higher taxes.

Santos, who opposes raising taxes, led in all but one of Colombia's provinces and was even winning in Bogota, considered a Mockus stronghold, with 40 percent of the vote to 27 percent for capital's former two-time mayor.

If no candidate in the field of nine wins a simple majority, the two top vote-getters will meet in a June 20 runoff.

Third with 10 percent was German Vargas of Cambio Radical, which along with Santos' National Unity party is a member of Uribe's governing coalition. Trailing him with 9 percent was the main opposition candidate, Gustavo Petro of the leftist Polo Democratico Alternativo.

Although generally peaceful, Sunday was marked by nearly two dozen clashes with leftist rebels that claimed the lives of at least three soldiers, a potent reminder that Colombia's half century-old conflict is far from resolved.

Combat was reported in six regions, most rural coca-growing centers in the south and west but also in Guajira state in the northeast, where one of the soldiers was killed. All three combat deaths were blamed by the government on the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces, or FARC.

The continuing violence — and Mockus' lack of clarity on how he would deal with it — appeared to favor Santos, a 58-year-old a Cabinet minister in three administrations who had been in a statistical dead heat in pre-election polls with Mockus, the son of Lithuanian immigrants running on the Green Party slate.

Michael Shifter, president of the Washington, D.C.-based Inter-American Dialogue think tank, said it appeared "the polls were way off the mark."

"My sense is that many Colombians were drawn to Mockus, his appealing message and what he represented, but in the end were worried about (electing) a relative novice on security and foreign policy questions," he said.

Santos, a first cousin of the outgoing vice president, billed himself as a continuation of Uribe's hugely popular U.S.-backed military buildup, which sharply curtailed kidnappings and murders though the homicide rate rose last year to 39.3 per 100,000 from 34.3 in 2008.

More:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/05/30/world/main6533681.shtml

:eyes: :eyes: :eyes: :eyes:

[Bacchus39]

7. wow, that was unexpected. vote results in El Tiempo

http://www.eltiempo.com

[Judi Lynn]

8. In Colombia, A Second Round but a Disappointing Finish

In Colombia, A Second Round but a Disappointing Finish
by Charles Lemos , Sun May 30, 2010 at 07:36:28 PM EDT
With 99.1 percent of the results in and no candidate achieving the required 50 percent plus one to claim the presidency, Colombia will head to a second round run off on June 20th. Juan Manuel Santos of the pro-Uribe Partido de la U came in first with a surprisingly strong 46.57 percent of the vote. The Green party candidate Antanas Mockus finished second but disappointingly won only 21.47 percent of the vote.

Candidate Party Vote Total Pct
Juan Manuel Santos Partido de la U 6,740,944 46.57%
Antanas Mockus Partido Verde 3,108,873 21.47%
Germán Vargas Lleras Cambio Radical 1,469,540 10.15%
Gustavo Petro Polo Democrático 1,326,756 9.16%
Noemí Sanín Conservador 889,756 6.14%
Rafael Pardo Liberal 632,955 4.37%

I'm still digesting the news feed but at first glance a few observations. Only 14,722,186 Colombians voted out of 29 million eligible. Once again indifference seems the big winner. Mockus finished poorly, the question is why did he underperform polling by some 15 points. Vargas Lleras, a dissident Liberal, did much better than expected more than doubling his expected vote tally. While he performed well in the debates, so did the leftist Gustavo Petro who finished a disappointing fourth. For the long dominant Conservatives and the Liberals, these results confirm a longer-term trend of political decline.

http://mydd.com/2010/5/30/in-colombia-a-second-round-but-a-disappointing-finish?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+mydd+%28MyDD%29

[Judi Lynn]

9. Former Uribe Minister Leads Colombia Election

Former Uribe Minister Leads Colombia Election
By SIMON ROMERO
Published: May 30, 2010

BOGOTÁ, Colombia — A scion of a powerful Colombian family comfortably won more votes than an eccentric former mayor of Bogotá in presidential elections on Sunday, but narrowly failed to get the majority needed to prevent a runoff election in June between the two men.

The lead vote-getter, Juan Manuel Santos, the architect of crushing blows against guerrillas as President Álvaro Uribe’s former defense minister, took 46.6 percent, against 21.5 percent for his main rival, Antanas Mockus, a French-educated mathematician who had unexpectedly emerged as a strong contender in the race, Colombian election authorities said Sunday night. Several other candidates garnered shares of the remainder of the vote.

Mr. Santos’s inability to win more than 50 percent opens the way for a new campaigning phase in which the two are expected to fiercely criticize each other’s capabilities yet again. Mr. Mockus has emphasized human rights scandals on his opponent’s watch as defense minister, while Mr. Santos has questioned if Mr. Mockus is ready to lead a country that faces resilient security threats from leftist rebels and drug-trafficking gangs.

Despite polls that briefly signaled that Mr. Mockus was within grasp of a victory, the results showed that many voters were instead ready to support Mr. Santos, who portrayed himself as the political heir to Mr. Uribe, a strong ally of the United States who lowered kidnapping and murder rates during his eight years in power.

More:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/31/world/americas/31colombia.html

[Judi Lynn]

10. Former defense minister on top in Colombia election

Former defense minister on top in Colombia election
Juan Manuel Santos wins more than twice as many votes as his nearest rival, former Bogota Mayor Antanas Mockus, but not enough to avoid a runoff.

By Jenny Carolina Gonzalez and Tracy Wilkinson, Special to The Times
May 31, 2010

Reporting from Bogota, Colombia, and Mexico City
Juan Manuel Santos, a veteran defense minister and political heir to conservative President Alvaro Uribe, surged well ahead in voting Sunday in Colombia's hard-fought presidential election but fell just shy of winning the simple majority that would have given him the office.

Belying most preelection polls, Santos won more than twice as many votes as his nearest rival, former Bogota Mayor Antanas Mockus, an eccentric underdog whose novel, colorful campaign had put him in serious competition with the better-established Santos.

The two will head for a runoff on June 20 unless Mockus drops out. Santos' huge margin in Sunday's vote, and his likely ability to win support from many of the seven other candidates in the race, seems to all but assure his eventual victory.

Jobs and public safety were issues that dominated the race. Voting on Sunday was largely peaceful, with security forces on high alert.

With all votes counted, Santos took 46.6% to 21.5% for Mockus.

Analysts, noting that polls had erroneously suggested a much closer race, said Mockus may have been judged too much of a novice on the national stage, even though his campaign resonated with Colombians weary of corruption and yearning for greater democracy and an emphasis on social programs.

More:
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-colombia-elections-20100531,0,6565151.story

[rabs]

11. Winner, disappointment and the big losers

There is going to be a lot of analysis in coming days.

But the point is that Mockus achieved what two months ago seemed impossible -- make it into a second-round runoff, which was what the Greens set out to do from the beginning.

The winner today was Santos. Mockus results were a disappointment. The big losers were the polling companies.

Ten days ago all polls had Santos/Mockus in a statistical tie, 35 percent to 34 percent. So how is it possible that Santos ROSE 11 points, to 46.5 percent, and Mockus DROPPED 13 points, to 21.5? One suspicion is that the polls were manipulated to inflate Mockus' figures and understimate Santos' figures. The polling companies are going to have a lot to explain.

There is going to be an investigation into the meeting Santos had on Friday with the president of the national voting-counting union this past Friday, two days before the election. To have the national results totally counted in less than two hours is mystifying, although it had been announced last week that in 78 minutes after polls closed all results would be known.

The Mockus campaign is pledging to go all out in this second round. But suspect the uribistas/santistas will pull out all stops to intimidate, buy and do all sorts of dirty tricks in the 21 days before the second-round vote.

The other candidates are now freeing their followers to vote as they wish in the second round. There will be a lot of jockeying back and forth in the next few days.

Meantime, Hillary will be in Bogota on June 8/9 and according to uribe, they will be talking about the FTA (which is dead in the water in the U.S. Congress) and the war on drugs ... which for a long time is going nowhere.

So now just have to wait for June 20.

[Judi Lynn]

12. Truly strange.Apparently we should have taken into account just who has been controlling the country

for two terms, and would have for another if he hadn't been stopped by the same Supreme Court he has been fighting, intimidating.

Clearly his regime's hold on the country is intense, and his Defense Secretary is hell bent on keeping every bit of power Uribe has seized for himself, with help from the murdering paraminitaries. He's "connected," after all.

Things do look interesting if anyone intends to do a half-way credible investigation of that sleazy meeting Santos had with that president of the people running the election operations.

So Hillary thrusts herself into the midst of this circus, no doubt coming to claim she can assure them of the FTA if they can prove they can beat down the FARCs some more in exactly the way they've done it under Uribe.

http://a.abcnews.com.nyud.net:8090/images/Politics/abc_MarkPenn_080612_mn.jpg http://img.wonkette.com.nyud.net:8090/assets/resources/2008/04/markpenn111-thumb.jpg

Don't forget this blob, Mark Penn, was working for both Hillary
Clinton, and Alvaro Uribe back during our Presidential primaries!

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com.nyud.net:8090/washington/images/2008/04/06/markpenn.jpg

[EFerrari]

19. Gah! That face should come with a warning!

[quakerboy]

13. Are these elections monitored?

Compared to the polling, it looks funny. What safeguards are in place to ensure that the results given are the results gotten?

[totodeinhere]

15. If they were going to fudge the results, why not have him win in the first round?

I think that the announced results were pretty accurate.

[quakerboy]

20. Because where a 15% overnight jump is hard to believe

20-30 % is a freekin Christmas miracle. And most people want at least a veneer of legitimacy to their elections.

I do not know that this is the case. But I do know that if general polling was off that much on an election here in the US, I would have some serious questions, and doubt the truth of the result. If it happened in Iran, we would by and large be accusing them of election fraud. What makes Columbia any different?

[Judi Lynn]

17. U.S. Americans assume they understand how Colombian elections are conducted,

that the U.S. "standards" are universal. Concerning elections, you have no farther to look than the U.S., 2000, 2004 to realize ours are NOT the epitome of cleanliness, nor honor.

"Mark Him on the Ballot - The One Wearing Glasses"
By Constanza Vieira

BOGOTA, May 8 , 2008 (IPS) - "With Uribe, we thought: this is the guy who is going to change the country," the 41-year-old fisherwoman told IPS.

That is why her fishing and farming village of 800 people in the central Colombian region of Magdalena Medio decided overwhelmingly to vote for current President Álvaro Uribe in the 2002 presidential elections, when he first ran.

The woman agreed to talk to IPS on the condition that she be asked neither her name (we will call her "L.") nor the name of her village.

The main city in the fertile region of Magdalena Medio is Barrancabermeja, an oil port on the Magdalena River, which runs across Colombia from south to north before emptying into the Caribbean Sea.

What convinced the villagers to vote for Uribe? "Because the region where we live is poor, very poor, it’s so difficult to find work, and when I heard him say ‘I am going to work for the poor, I am going to help them,’ I thought ‘this is a good president’."

When the right wing president’s first four-year term came to an end in 2006, most of the villagers decided again to vote for him, reasoning that he just needed more time to reduce poverty.

The odd thing was that in both the 2002 and 2006 elections, despite the fact that the villagers had already decided to vote for Uribe, the far-right paramilitaries, who had committed a number of murders since 1998, when they appeared in the region that was previously dominated by the left wing guerrillas, pressured the local residents to vote for Uribe anyway.

The paramilitaries did not kill people to pressure the rest to vote for Uribe, as they did in other communities, but merely used "threats," said L.

"If you don't vote for Uribe, you know what the consequences will be," the villagers were told ominously.

And on election day, they breathed down voters’ necks: "This is the candidate you’re going to vote for. You’re going to put your mark by this one. The one wearing glasses," they would say, pointing to Uribe’s photo on the ballot, L. recalled.

"One (of the paramilitaries) was on the precinct board, another one was standing next to the table, and another was a little way off, all of them watching to see if you voted for Uribe," she added, referring to the less than subtle way that the death squads commanded by drug traffickers and allies of the army ensured that L.’s village voted en masse for the current president in both elections.

"We form part of a municipality where there is corruption, from the mayor to town councillors, the police, the army and the justice officials - in a word, everyone. They are just one single corrupt mass. So what are you supposed to do?" said L., who added that the paramilitaries "control everything."

More:
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=42290

[cqo_000]

14. What happened to the photo-finish?

By Adriaan Alsema Colombia Reports
30 May 2010

The impressive victory of Juan Manuel Santos in the first round of Colombia's presidential elections leaves many baffled. Despite a virtual popularity in the polls and a hype in foreign media, the man who would change everything, Antanas Mockus, did not even receive half the votes his opponent did.

...

What analysts and disappointed Mockus supporters now will have to try to understand is how everyone came to think there was a neck-and-neck race going on while in the end there never was a neck-and-neck race at all.

...


A few people should really do some serious introspective: the pollsters for being so incredibly wrong about the reality, the media for exactly the same reason and me, for being so surprised about the outcome.


http://colombiareports.com/opinion/89-from-the-editor/9987-what-happened-to-the-photo-finish.html

[totodeinhere]

16. It was a lot of wishful thinking on the part of Chavez lovers. n/t

[Judi Lynn]

18. What would Chavez have to do with this?

Make your point intelligently, why not, instead of trying to take a feeble kick at progressives?

[naaman fletcher]

21. I don't know,

In part because chavez has nothing to do with progressives. As you can see form information posted, the workers are now fighting him. He is not a progressive.

[BolivarianHero]

22. You tell me...

Mockus isn't even a leftist.