Election Day, Colombia
Today, Sunday March 13, 2022 is Election Day in Colombia. It’s a very different system than the United States. Some of the differences:
- It’s on a Sunday. In the U.S., of course, elections are always on a Tuesday.
- La Ley Seca (the dry law): from 6 pm on Saturday (the night before) till 6 am on Monday (the morning after, when presumably all the votes will be counted) the sale and consumption of intoxicating beverages is prohibited. What this seems to mean in practice is that bars and restaurants and larger stores stop selling alcoholic beverages. No glass of wine for Dave last night in the Italian restaurant, despite the dozens of wine bottles decorating the walls. It seems that small stores still sell the stuff, as long as the purchaser takes the hooch home in an opaque black plastic bag. I don’t think that any law enforcement official is worried too much about the consumption part, except when it comes to events sponsored by candidates and political parties. Also, it’s illegal to show up drunk at a polling place. In any case, last night, a Saturday night, was by far the quietest night of the four I’ve experienced here in El Centro de Santa Marta. (If you are interested in the effect of alchohol on Colombian politics, check out episode 44 of El Patron del Mal — the original Pablo Escobar narconovela — on Netflix.)
- This is a national election, for Senate and Chamber of Representatives and the Presidential primaries, and for the Senate the voting is national and at-large. Well, almost: there are a couple seats in the Senate reserved for indigenous people. (For the Chamber of Representatives, it gets much more complicated, with a complicated system of proportional representation that I haven’t figured out yet). Anyway, all the candidates for the Senate have their hometowns, of course, but if elected, they won’t be the Senator for Antioquia or the Senator from Magdalena, they’ll just have a seat in the Senate as a member of their party.
- So basically you vote for a party, and here’s where it gets really different from the system in the U.S.:
- Some parties have already picked their predefined list of Senate candidates. For example, there’s a new feminist political party called Estamos Listas Colombia (left column, 4th down in the sample ballot above). Their ballot for the Senate just shows the party name. If they get enough votes to have just one seat in the Senate, they will send their leader (Elizabeth Giraldo); if they get enough votes for three seats, they will send their top three candidates, if they get enough votes for ten seats, they’ll send their top ten candidates, etc.
- Other parties let the voters choose which candidates they prefer within the vote for the party. For these parties, the ballot shows a list of numbers (not names). So they candidates have to advertise their number: on the bus ride here from Cartagena, I saw a lot of billboards with messages like “Vote for me, the one who will make a difference, Candidate So-and-so, Party Such-and-such, Number 106.” What a challenge for the candidates! They have to build not just name recognition, but number recognition! I think these parties also have predefined lists, so I think what happens is that voting for a particular number moves that candidate up higher in the list.
- Then there’s the presidential primaries, which have settled into three big coalitions, a coalition of the left-leaning parties, a coalition of centrist parties, and a coalition of center-right parties. In other words, various smaller parties have agreed to hold a primary together to pick one candidate that they can all live with. The current party in power, Centro Democrático, which despite its name is considered to be the party of the far-right, has already chosen its candidate internally. So it looks like the main presidential election in May will have four candidates.
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