Why Petro is casting doubts about the 2026 elections' transparency
Petro has cast doubts about the transparency of the 2026 elections. What's true & what's not in this latest controversy.
On July 8, Petro tweeted that he ‘distrusted the transparency of the 2026 elections’, starting to cast doubts about the fairness and transparency of the 2026 congressional and presidential elections. The main reason for his distrust is the participation of Thomas Greg & Sons in election logistics—the same company that Petro ordered be kicked out of the passport production business.
Who is Thomas Greg & Sons?
Thomas Greg & Sons, a large conglomerate specialized in secure printing, biometric identity services and electoral logistics, just won another 2.1 trillion pesos (US$ 526 million) contract from the Registraduría for the 2026 elections—including voter and candidate registration, biometric authentication, the electoral ‘kit’ (ballot papers, voter lists, results forms for vote counters, pens etc.) and publishing the preliminary vote count (preconteo) data online.
Thomas Greg & Sons is a big government contractor, which has won billions in government contracts since 2005. It has won contracts for election logistics from the Registraduría in every election cycle since 2010. In 2022, it had won a dozen contracts for electoral logistics, worth over 337 million dollars, and in 2023 it won another 15 contracts for electoral logistics, worth over 367 million dollars. Many of these contracts were adjudicated with little transparency and oversight, under expedited selection processes. This year, the requirements in the tender specifications were more flexible to allow for the participation of more interested parties, and ten possible bidders, including two foreign companies, indicated their interest in participating—but in the end only one bid was presented. The MOE, Colombia’s leading election monitoring organization, praised some improvements compared to past contracts, including that it was awarded earlier, that the specifications were more flexible and that the Registraduría held a technical meeting with relevant organizations to explain the contract’s details.
Thomas Greg has also managed the passport production business uninterruptedly since 2007, and only on three occasions in those years did it have to compete with other bidders to win the contracts. The ongoing passport imbroglio, which recently led to the resignation of foreign minister Laura Sarabia following disagreements with Petro on the issue, is explained more here. Thomas Greg & Sons has continued managing the process through an emergency contract since 2023, but now Petro, via his new chief of staff, ‘pastor’ Alfredo Saade, has ordered that they be booted out on September 1 when the current contract ends. The government is now rushing ahead with a new public-private partnership, with the Colombian national printing office (Imprenta Nacional) and the Portuguese Casa da Moeda, in spite of repeated warnings—including from Sarabia and the foreign ministry—that the new model isn’t ready yet and that it needs another 35 weeks to get ready. Despite Saade’s claims in early July, the agreement with Portugal hasn’t been signed yet, the Portuguese are reportedly frustrated by the government’s improvisation and the Imprenta Nacional just wasted a year.
For a company that’s won so many big government contracts, not much is known about Thomas Greg & Sons. Founded in 1959, the company is owned by the Bautista family (today it’s owned by the three sons of the founder, Gregorio Bautista). The family flies under the radar. Back in the 1980s, Camilo and Fernando Bautista were convicted of bank fraud in the United States, having obtained bank loans by presenting false coffee shipments and fraudulent loan guarantees (Camilo served three years in jail and was released in 1989). Over the years, several leading politicians have been on the company’s board of directors, including former presidents Juan Manuel Santos and Andrés Pastrana, as well as former cabinet minister and three-time presidential candidate Noemí Sanín. The left loves to depict Thomas Greg & Sons as the nefarious big corporate monster, controlled by the elites and establishment, that must necessarily be part of conspiracy. For example, Carlos Caicedo, former left-wing governor of Magdalena and potential 2026 presidential candidate, tweeted that Thomas Greg is not only a company but also the “symbol of how an elite has captured the state” and that the current controversies reflect the true fear of the elites: that the people wake up and take back control of democracy.
Election fraud?
Since 2018, Petro has had a bone to pick with Thomas Greg & Sons, both because he thinks that a private company shouldn’t be involved in public activities like elections or passports, and because he insists, with little evidence, that Thomas Greg & Sons is responsible for election fraud. In 2024, Petro had said that the Colombian electoral system was ‘much worse’ than the Venezuelan electoral system, claiming that one private company (Thomas Greg) controls everything. Petro believes that the risk for fraud is in the ‘election kits’ and the software (for the full vote count, or escrutinio).
Petro has brought up the 2022 congressional elections, when there was an abnormally big difference between the preliminary results and the final certified results, with the Pacto winning 577,000 extra votes (and four more senators) in the final count because of a cascade of errors in the preconteo—a poorly designed form (known as the E-14) reporting votes from each polling location, mistakes (intentional or unintentional) in the E-14 forms filled out and in the transmission of E-14 data, the selection of many young unexperienced election workers and poor training of election workers. The Pacto has repeatedly claimed that 500,000 votes were fraudulently ‘stolen’ from them, but the preconteo has no legal value and these irregularities were corrected by the final count (escrutinio), which produces the certified results—so the votes were never ‘lost’ or ‘stolen’. In the 2022 presidential election, there were no similar errors and the difference between the two preliminary and final results was minimal. The 2022 fiasco was largely due to the Registraduría and the incompetence of then-national registrar Alexander Vega (who is now co-president of the Partido de la U), who ignored prior warnings about the poor design of the E-14 form (which is designed by the authorities, not the contractor). There is little evidence that anything in the electoral kit generates ‘physical fraud’ (as Petro is calling it). Unlike what Petro seems to believe, it isn’t the first time that Thomas Greg & Sons’ logistics contract includes the electoral kit.
The fabled software—for the counting of votes in the final escrutinio—is Petro’s other main claim to suspect fraud. He brings up the case of the MIRA, the biggest substantiated case of fraud in recent Colombian electoral history. In 2018, the Council of State awarded three senators to the MIRA, after proving that irregularities, including sabotage of the software, had fraudulently prevented the party from reaching the threshold in the 2014 elections. Although Thomas Greg & Sons was part of the winning group for the election logistics contract in 2014, the court’s decision didn’t evidence any wrongdoing by them, and the irregularities were on aspects of the software that were provided by another company.
In that decision, the Council of State had ordered that the state acquire and control the required software for escrutinios. That order has only partially been complied with, because the software for local and departmental counts is still held by Thomas Greg. In 2022, the state bought the software for the national (top-level) count from the Spanish company Indra (which, at the time, was the subject of another deranged conspiracy theory, this time coming from the right with former president Andrés Pastrana). Audits of those systems has remained limited, because of intellectual and industrial property issues, and Petro again recently complained that the right to audit the software has never been guaranteed. For 2026, national registrar Hernán Penagos has said that an audit of the source code of the software will take place, but details haven’t been announced. In any case, the software doesn’t count the votes in Colombia (voting is manual) and Thomas Greg & Sons won’t be counting the votes in 2026.
Petro’s smoke and mirrors
It’s somewhat bewildering that Petro, time and time again, criticizes an electoral system under which he won the 2022 elections (and other elections before that), and that, as sitting president, he instills distrust in the electoral system.
It’s clear that there are many problems and shortcomings in the Colombian electoral system, including some cases of fraud and irregularities, and the business dealings of Thomas Greg & Sons do raise some very fair questions. However, while very imperfect, the Colombian electoral system has a set of guarantees that have allowed irregularities to be resolved and recent elections in the country have continued to be largely free and fair. In addition, Thomas Greg & Sons have managed electoral logistics in the last few electoral cycles fairly well—which is more than can be said for a lot of government contractors in Colombia—and they demonstrably have the experience required to run such a huge, complex task as election logistics.
The real problem in Colombian elections, far more than contracts to big corporations, is political violence—which has increased significantly over the past decade, and recently made very visible to the entire world with the assassination attempt against uribista pre-candidate Miguel Uribe Turbay on June 7 in Bogotá.
Petro is a master at deviating attention from uncomfortable topics by creating smokescreens. By questioning the transparency of the next elections and waving the flag of fraud in the hands of a big corporation, Petro shifts attention and media coverage away from the passport imbroglio, Sarabia’s resignation, government mismanagement and the widespread fears that citizens will be left without passports after September 1, towards familiar terrain: the narrative that he doesn’t have any power, that the real power is held by business elites, that the government is the victim of a permanent conspiracy with a thousand heads. Thomas Greg & Sons is the perfect big corporate boogeyman that can remotivate his base, and the latest tool to continue the pre-electoral strategy of confrontation and ‘popular mobilization’ (after the consulta popular, the decretazo, the constituyente).
It is undoubtedly quite concerning that Petro is sowing doubts and distrust about the 2026 elections. Some right-wingers have taken it to mean, without any evidence of their own, that Petro now wants to ‘postpone the elections’, something that Petro has denied (and Penagos, the national registrar, has also said that the elections won’t be delayed). More seriously, Petro’s comments raise some more valid questions as to whether he’ll recognize the results of next year’s elections or if he’ll facilitate a routine transfer of power to his elected successor.