How to check the evidence without being a technical specialist

The question that guides the entire book

The electoral result is not born directly on a screen. It starts on a table, is written on forms, becomes digital files, goes through processing systems and ends up in consolidated data. The question is whether this journey can be followed and verified from beginning to end.

When a station shows a difference, it does not present it in isolation. It identifies where in this chain the difference appears, how it is reproduced, and which document the Court needs to complete the verification.

Two ways to read

Changing modes does not change the evidence. It changes the level of detail at which it is examined.

The anatomy of a station

1. Why it matters: explains why the finding may be relevant to the court decision.
2. Question investigated: defines exactly what FITE wanted to verify.
3. Fountain: identifies the document, file or data from which the operation is based.
4. Action: the reader activates groups, switches versions, changes the order or selects controls.
5. Visible reaction: the figure, the document or the sequence changes before the reader.
6. Result: expresses the fact that anyone can obtain it again with the same source and operation.
7. Expert conclusion: explains what that result technically means for traceability, integrity or verifiability.
8. Application: identifies what the authority must exhibit to reconstruct the section that remains in its custody.

Rule of thumb: If a button only opens text, it is used for navigation. If the action modifies the visible evidence and allows the operation to be understood, it serves to verify.

How to distinguish what you are reading

Essential words, explained as everyday objects

E-1

Notification of appointment as a jury. Tell the person where and when to appear.

E-10

List of citizens authorized at the table. There the jury compares the document of whoever comes to vote.

E-11

Voter registration of the table. It allows us to compare how many people participated and serves as a control of the total.

E-14

Form where the jurors write and sign the table votes. Three copies are filled out with different destinations.

E-14 transmission

Copy delivered to the post transmitter. Their codes and figures are dictated by telephone to the Telephone Reception Center to feed the pre-count.

E-14 for delegates

Copy addressed to departmental delegates. It is digitized and published for citizen consultation.

E-14 for claveros

Copy placed under electoral custody and used by the commissions during the official scrutiny.

Claveros

Officials responsible for receiving, placing, safeguarding and removing electoral documents from the triclave chest under the prescribed procedure.

Polling-place delegates

Officials responsible for organizing the polling place, supporting the juries and coordinating the delivery and transfer of electoral materials and records.

CRT

Telephone Reception Center. Room where receivers listen to the results dictated from the voting stations.

FRT

Telephone Results Form. Record on which the receiver writes the results of a polling table and electoral contest after repeating them through the “echo” control.

Precount

Fast route transmission, reception, verification, consolidation and disclosure based on transmission E-14.

Scrutiny

Official review of electoral documents by the competent commissions, with complaints and recounts when appropriate.

E-24 and E-26

Subsequent scrutiny documents. They allow you to follow how the table data was consolidated.

Metadata

The technical identity card of a file: program, date, producer and other data about its creation.

SHA-256 Hash

A fingerprint calculated over all the bytes of the file. Two different fingerprints prove that the digital files are not identical.

Hexadecimal

A way of writing numbers using 0–9 and A–F. It can represent identifiers or fingerprints, but visible hexadecimal text is not automatically the SHA-256 hash of the PDF.

Traceability

The possibility of following the complete path of a document: origin, versions, uploads, changes and destination.

historical version

A copy preserved at an earlier date. Comparing it with another allows you to know if the published file remained the same.

Document version

An identifiable edition of a file within its publication history. It should be linked to a date, origin, hash, upload and any replacement.

XREF

A PDF's internal table that points to its objects. An XREF warning is a technical datum that must be checked against the producer, generation process and other versions of the file.

Objective digital difference

A measurable difference between two files. It does not depend on an opinion: it is obtained by comparing its bytes, hashes, structure or representation.

Intersection

The part shared by two groups. In the book it is also explained as “tables that appear in both families.”

Nested groups

Groups contained within each other, like boxes: the 95 municipalities are within the 150 and these within the 256.

Population census

DANE count or estimate of the people living in a territory. Describes inhabitants; It is not a list of cards authorized to vote.

Electoral census

Database of ID cards authorized to vote in Colombia and abroad. It is updated with its own legal and administrative movements. It is not a statistical projection of inhabitants.

Outside the threshold

A value that crosses the limit defined for review. The threshold selects cases that must undergo documentary verification and human control before the corresponding conclusion is formulated.

MMV

Structured export of results by polling table and candidate. It is not the E-14 scan: it is a table that locates department, municipality, zone, polling place, polling table, candidate and votes.

MMS

Structured record of polling-table control variables, such as voters, ballot-box total, destroyed ballots, status and counts, according to the preserved fields.

Local continuity

Asks whether neighboring polling tables preserve similar candidate shares within the official sequence.

Sequence direction

Indicates whether a candidate's share rises or falls as the official polling-table number advances.

Polling-table load

Number of votes contributed by that polling table to the total. A polling table with more votes carries more weight in the aggregate sum.

Reordering control

Contrasts the observed sequence with alternative orders of the same polling tables while preserving their votes and the polling-place composition.

Streak or block

A sequence of consecutive polling tables with repeated behavior. Order matters: when the order is shuffled, the sequence can disappear.

In the book, difficult terms can also be opened within the same page to consult their explanation without abandoning the discovery.

The complete route: who delivers to whom

1. The Registry forms and purifies the census and closes the universe of authorized ID cards.
2. The electoral roll, DIVIPOL and electoral logistics organize that universe by department, municipality, zone, polling place and polling table. Registrars set sites in coordination with mayors and apply the authorized potential per polling table.
3. The internal allocation assigns each identity card to a numbered polling table and generates E-10/E-11. The exact ordering rule and its versions are a central part of the information requested.
4. The Registry and contracted logistics They produce and distribute kits, forms, envelopes and cards, with manifests and delivery records.
5. The polling jurors receive votes, register voters, count, and complete and sign three identical E‑14 copies: Transmission, Delegates and Claveros. Witnesses may photograph all three before they are separated.
6. The transmission copy passes to the polling-place transmitter, who dictates codes and figures by telephone to a CRT; the receiver repeats, confirms and completes the FRT.
7. The pre-count system validates codes, processes FRT records, consolidates successive cutoffs and publishes bulletins.
8. The Delegates copy is collected, taken to digitization and passes through a scanner, workstation, software, batch, storage and citizen viewer. The source file, operator, date, hash, upload and version must be identified.
9. The Transmission copy may also be digitized, but its scan does not replace the other route born from the same paper: call, FRT, capture, validation, consolidation and bulletin.
10. The Claveros copy and the electoral records follow the E‑17 → transport → E‑19 → three-key chest → E‑20 → scrutiny commission → minutes/E‑24/E‑26 chain. Its image may be published from the scrutiny operation.
11. MMV/MMS represent the polling table in structured datasets; every row should be traceable to its source document, system and version.

Open the matrix of routes and official sources

The Order Footprint, explained without difficult mathematics

The main case is 2026. The route to the Order Footprint began with the Tunja microcase, whose line and tabular files were contributed by Frente Digital (@frentedigital2026); FITE performed the independent verification, reconstruction and analysis and then expanded the examination to Abelardo de la Espriella's candidacy. In the 2026 interior corpus, the combination of candidate share and polling-table load shifted the margin by +432,826.77 toward Abelardo. The analysis then moved backward to 2022 and 2018 to determine whether the architecture already existed.

Imagine a store with several boxes of oranges. The first boxes are large and the last are small. If 70% of a box of 100 oranges has a yellow sticker, that box provides 70 yellow ones. If the same 70% appears in a box of 50, it contributes 35. The percentage is the same; the large box contributes double the total.

With four boxes—100, 100, 50, and 50 oranges—and yellow percentages of 70%, 60%, 40%, and 30%, the sum is 70+60+20+15=165 yellow and 30+40+30+35=135 blues. If each box had 75 oranges maintaining those percentages, there would be 150 of each color. The actual structure leaves yellow 15 above and blue 15 below the comparator: the margin changes 30.

The final account is 165−150=+15 for yellow and 135−150=−15 for blue. As there are always 300 oranges in total, the 15 that one color is above are the same 15 that the other color is below. That's why the margin changes 30: (165−135)−(150−150)=30.

If yellow represents candidate A and blue represents candidate B, A is left with 15 more votes and B with 15 fewer votes than in the comparator of equal boxes. The oranges did not physically change from one color to another. The change arises because the percentages most favorable to A remained within the large boxes and the most favorable to B within the small ones.

That means “weigh more”: not that one vote is worth more, but that the table contains and contributes more votes to the sum. If the tables most favorable to a candidate are also those that contribute the most votes, that coincidence changes the aggregate margin.

In the real comparison, each box represents the votes recorded at a polling table. It may be fuller because more citizens were assigned to that polling table, because a larger proportion of eligible citizens voted, or because the final “tail table” received a smaller remainder. The electoral roll by polling table, E-10 and E-11 make it possible to separate these causes.

In the paired 2022 panel, early polling tables contributed an average of 242.55 Hernández+Petro votes, while late polling tables contributed 201.38. At the same time, Hernández's relative increase from the first to the second round was 11.85 points in early polling tables and 2.55 points in late polling tables. The more favorable change was therefore located where each polling table carried more weight in the aggregate sum.

The combined effect, measured across 89,718 polling tables in 5,291 polling places, shifted the margin by +252,655.30 toward Hernández. After the overseas constituency was completely excluded, the effect remained +251,871.11. The 999 within-place permutations produced an approximate central range from −4,457 to +4,278; the observed value lay far beyond that range.

Open the controlled results file for 2018–2022–2026

The verification compares the observed result with alternative orders built from the same polling tables and the same votes. This preserves the electoral content while examining the role of the official sequence.

How to read an expert conclusion

An expert conclusion is not a political opinion or an alarm phrase. It is the technical meaning of a fact that the reader has already been able to verify.

1. First, the fact: For example, three records in a table have the same number and a fourth shows another.
2. Then the verification: the reader separates the digits of the fourth number and repeats the visible change.
3. Then, the meaning: If the same type of change reappears, we are not facing a single isolated difference but rather a repeated transformation into a field of control.
4. Finally, what must be delivered: the system, rule, history, and records that explain how that field was created or validated.

What each test family checks

When the test includes Excel

Excel should not seem like a warehouse of figures. It should function as a checking table.

1. “Read first”: source, date, version, universe and purpose.
2. One row, one unit: Each table or municipality retains its identifier.
3. Human columns: understandable names, units and meaning.
4. Visible formulas: sums and counts that the reader can inspect.
5. Control boxes: source located, repeated calculation, comparison performed and status of the case.
6. Return link: The table indicates which finding explains the data and where its evidence is.

Three examples before entering the book

The conclusion that the book submits to the Court

The Order Footprint names a finding measured in the official numbering of polling tables: candidate shares and vote loads are not distributed independently of the ordinal position each polling table occupies within its polling place.

Continuity, direction and effect on the margin were separated and tested through different controls. The paired 2022 result does not compare different places: it follows the same polling-table keys across both rounds and shows where Hernández's relative increase was concentrated and how much those polling tables weighed in the total.

The conclusion is serious and concrete: in the principal case submitted to the Court—the 2026 presidential election—the coincidence of a higher favorable share and a higher vote load produced a material and reproducible shift in the margin toward Abelardo de la Espriella. The same structure was already present toward Hernández in 2022 and toward Duque in 2018. Those two years do not replace the 2026 controversy; they are historical controls showing continuity. The authority must disclose the allocation rule, its versions, the E-10/E-11/E-14/FRT/MMV/E-24/E-26 chain and each operator's records to explain how the pattern was formed and maintained.