Hernán Penagos moved Friday to shut down a warning that had begun spreading days before Colombia’s presidential election: voters do not need to fear the pens at polling tables, and they do not need to use the ones supplied by the Registraduría. He said the electoral body had technically tested the pens, reviewed the ink, and found no risk to the validity of ballots.
The dispute landed just a few days before the presidential vote, when every rumor about election security travels fast and confidence matters almost as much as the count itself. Petro had urged citizens to bring their own pen to vote, warning that allegedly erasable ink had been used in Ecuador, a message that quickly pushed the pens at polling places into the center of a familiar suspicion.
Penagos answered by saying voters are free to bring their own pen if they want, but they are not required to mark ballots with the one handed out by the Registraduría. He said the body has pens at all voting tables and that those pens were tested with the presence of political campaigns and electoral observation groups.
He was blunt about the concern. “It is the most common myth,” he said, adding that the ink does not disappear and that the pens “do not do magic.” He also said the tests checked the ink component, and that the result was meant to remove any doubt about whether a mark on a ballot could be challenged later.
The reassurance rests on how Colombia votes. Penagos said the system is mainly manual, with physical tarjetones and actas that can be checked by campaign election witnesses. He also said the software used in the process was audited and placed under controls with international accompaniment and participation from different political forces, a reminder that the process depends on both paper and digital safeguards.
That is why the pen debate matters more than it sounds. In Penagos’s view, the real threats to electoral transparency are not the pens on the table, but vote buying, irregular campaign financing and the misuse of public resources. Those are harder to photograph than an ink cartridge, yet they do more damage than a rumor about stationery ever could.
For Sunday, the Registraduría says it plans to install all voting tables normally. The immediate question is not whether people can bring their own pen; they can. It is whether the system can keep the focus where Penagos says it belongs, on the vote itself and on the controls around it, not on a fear that has returned just in time to unsettle another election.
