Public Notice on Bill 569 of 2025

Public Notice on Bill 569 of 2025, "By means of which measures are established on the preparation, publication, and dissemination of surveys and other provisions are issued."

Electoral surveys are fundamental tools for the informed exercise of several political rights. As recognized by the Constitutional Court, they allow political campaigns to design their proposals, strategies, and tactics based on knowledge of voters' opinions, which allows them to more directly interpret their hopes and needs.

Political organizations and movements use them to measure the level of awareness, acceptance, and eventual voting intention of potential candidates. Prohibiting a potential candidate for the presidency of Colombia, for the governorship of a department, or for the mayoralty of a municipality, their political movements and strategists, and voters from accessing surveys to make decisions is like asking a driver to turn off their headlights when driving at night.

They also help voters form their opinions and define their voting intentions, to the extent that these can be legitimately linked to the candidates' real electoral prospects. It would not be enough for them to simply allow them to know the level of awareness and favorability of potential candidates at any given point in time, even more so when the proposed law is entirely subjective, stating that "candidates who possess significant relevance or public notoriety, have participated in previous similar elections, or have manifest favorability or recognition must be included." On the one hand, it discriminates against new figures with political aspirations, limiting the questions to those with established political experience. And, on the other hand, it is impossible to know a person's level of favorability and recognition until they have been asked.

As the high court noted, "opinion polls not only transform electorate tendencies, but also promote the transformation of political proposals, encourage coalitions, and provoke resignations." This is so that potential candidates can also understand the main needs of the population and respond to these with their proposals.

It is precisely this value that polls have in political competition and electoral matters that requires regulations adopted after an extensive process of citizen dialogue, approved by the Congress of the Republic and reviewed by the Constitutional Court against precise rules that not only do not affect, but also enhance, the exercise of other rights, such as the right to information (both active and passive), the right to political nomination, the right to informed voting, and several others.

Unfortunately, Bill No. 569 of 2025, which was approved by the Congress of the Republic and is pending presidential approval, did not meet any of these standards nor will it serve any of the aforementioned purposes.

Surprisingly, the House of Representatives decided to process the bill as an ordinary law, when in the Senate it had been processed, as it should be, as a statutory law. The arguments that led the corporation to make this decision are, in the opinion of several legal experts, flawed and tainted the bill's processing by omitting the guarantees of enhanced deliberation and approval required by laws regulating matters sensitive to the democratic system.

All laws adopted in Colombia since 1991 regulating the conduct and dissemination of electoral polls have been statutory laws, approved by qualified majorities and subject to mandatory review by the Constitutional Court. There is no justification for arguing that the norms contained in this bill should not be accorded the same status when they include provisions that affect the essential core of several of the rights involved and have a tremendous impact on electoral competition.

Furthermore, if the aforementioned bill comes into force, it would seriously violate the right to information because, as the Constitutional Court has also stated, "there is no valid basis for prohibiting respondents from expressing their opinions on a public matter, and the disclosure of which does not violate public order, privacy, or the common good" (C 488 of 1993).

The disclosure of electoral polls is a matter of general interest; therefore, their restriction is absurd. "It violates both the right to information and the right to information, since it prevents the dissemination of data that are of general interest; and it also constitutes an attack on freedom of expression, since it prevents the expression of the opinions of the surveyed sector, without substantive legal reasons to support this prohibitive position," in addition to constituting an act of censorship.

Complementing the points mentioned above, the polling firms signing this statement have preliminarily identified additional arguments:

• There is a myth that polls influence voters in favor of the winner. There is no scientific study to support this claim. On the contrary, there is abundant evidence of cases that refute this belief. A few recent examples among the many that exist are: Why did President Duque win if he was far behind in the polls at the beginning of 2018? Why did Governor Andrés Julián Rendón win in Antioquia if he hadn't been winning in the polls in the previous month? Furthermore, why did Mayor Alejandro Eder win in Cali if he hadn't been winning in the polls in the previous week? The reality is overwhelming: polls are part of the electoral process, but it is impossible to determine when, how much, to what extent, or in what direction (for or against) they exert influence. If the myth is that people point to the winner, why are there so many first, second, third, and fourth-place finishers in the polls that they end up winning an election? The only thing that all the examples demonstrate is that polls measure the state of opinion at a given moment, and that opinion changes due to a multitude of factors very different from the polls themselves, which reinforces the need to measure the effect of these many factors at any given moment in time.

• It would be unfair, given the restriction on the publication of polls at any point in time, for only a small group of citizens to have access to private information, while the general public lacks the necessary information to make their own judgments based on their knowledge and understanding, and to decide and analyze what is best for them.

• The restriction on the publication of serious polls will almost certainly lead to the proliferation of poll or survey results on social media without any technical support, which will only generate greater confusion. In the dark ages, it is easier for "fake news" to thrive.

• The best decision-maker for the quality of a product or service, in this case polls, will always be the market, and it is this market that determines who does and doesn't carry out their work with seriousness and professionalism, and those who don't will be discarded. Many companies have been conducting serious opinion polls for decades, while others have quickly disappeared.

• The media typically always hire services from companies with recognized experience and seriousness, because both media outlets and pollsters are putting their reputations at stake in the electoral process. Why, then, mandate the use of certain methodologies or sample sizes, mandate the delivery of data to the National Electoral Council (CNE), as if there were a presumption of wrongdoing? In their professional practice, what doctor would be asked for all the information they used to make their diagnosis and then subject it to prosecution by the State? The current law already requires the submission of a detailed technical sheet that clearly indicates the methodological details of a survey and the professionalism with which it was conducted. Furthermore, today it requires sending a detailed report to the CNE with all the results. That is more than sufficient. What the new law proposes is senseless state interference in the practice of a profession, withering away a market, affecting jobs, and reducing citizens' choice.

• This industry clearly recognizes that the quality of surveys is more important than the size of a specific sample. It is also more important to be able to measure at various points in time to identify changes and trends than to measure only on a few occasions. The sample size requirements proposed by the law, especially when it specifies the "forced selection of certain municipalities," which goes against probabilistic selection, mean that many potential candidates, political movements, and media outlets cannot use them, as budgets will prevent them from doing so due to the more expensive surveys. Therefore, it also reduces the possibility of accessing information only to those individuals or legal entities with large budgets. Surveys serve to reduce uncertainty, and this gag order is promoting people living in uncertainty.

• It also violates the right to work, as polling firms employ single mothers, people with no work experience, students, among others.

• By proposing the application of a formula from the law of probability, the bill ignores many of the scientific components that support it, such as psychology, anthropology, statistics itself, data science, and the know-how involved in applying this theoretical background to a practical exercise in a complex reality like Colombia's. Bill 569 treats complex things as simple, and static things that continually flux with the advancement of information science.

• Finally, the bill also violates the protection of respondents' personal data because, although it does not require the respondent's name to be entered into the Data, it does require the provision of private information such as phone number or address, socioeconomic status, age, gender, marital status, and all the sociodemographic data that are included in the questions in a voting intention survey.

Therefore, and with solid and sufficient arguments, we publicly urge President Gustavo Petro to object to the aforementioned bill for the constitutional reasons expressed in this statement and to prevent the serious infringement of rights that are central to our Constitution.

Rosalba Olivella W. President (E) ACEI	Martín Orozco Pfeifer General Manager of Invamer
Pablo Lemoine Arboleda President of the Centro Nacional de Consultoría	Oswaldo Acevedo Gómez General Manager of Yanhaas