Presupuesto Participativo & Digital Voting (medellindecide.co)
This overview was generated with AI from the public sources listed below and checked against them before publication. It has not had a complete human fact-check — treat it as a starting point and follow the sources.
How this atlas is made · What “last verified” means · What “source-checked” means
168,156 residents voted on how the city spends its money in 2025, the highest turnout in the program's 21-year history. The legal instruments that govern it remain contestable in court.
what does this mean?
The strongest source is the operator's or the city's own reporting — an official report, dataset or press release. It grades who did the looking — not how well the project went. All four grades →Part of 1001 Smart Cities — 1,167 documented projects · 🏙️ 9 more in Medellín · 🗳️ Citizen participation guide · 🏛️ Governance projects
Since 2004, Medellín residents have voted annually on how to spend 5% of the municipality's discretionary budget through Presupuesto Participativo. Paper ballots gave way to the medellindecide.co platform, fully virtual since the 2020 pandemic cycle and biometrically verified with the national civil registry. The 2025 vote drew a record 168,156 participants.
📊 Impact
2025 cycle: 168,156 participants — the highest in the program's 21-year history — with 153,008 votes cast virtually via medellindecide.co (biometrically verified against the national civil registry) and 15,150 in person, allocating over 490,000 million COP (~5% of the city's discretionary budget) across 16 comunas and 5 corregimientos.
🎓 Lesson
A two-decade-old participation mechanism can be digitized and see turnout keep climbing, but the legal instruments that govern it stay contestable in court even as the program runs — legality and legitimacy aren't settled once and for all.
Sources
Continue exploring
Compare this project
Explore the wider context
📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Presupuesto Participativo & Digital Voting (medellindecide.co)” — Medellín, Colombia. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/medellin-participatory-budget/ (last verified 2026-07-30). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.