During the recent Legislative and Municipal elections held on
March 4, El Salvador’s elections tribunal implemented a software solution to consolidate, aggregate and publish results, which allowed them to offer
reliable and timely preliminary counts.
Back in 2015, the Superior Electoral Court (TSE in Spanish) took
three weeks to come up with an official tally. With this fresh memory in mind,
and given the recent events in neighbouring Honduras (where they had to wait 21
days for results, amid protests and unrest that left 33 dead), the TSE decided
to take no risks. In addition to the software solution used to announce winners
only a few hours after voting ended, the TSE also utilized another technology solution to audit its own preliminary results.
Mission accomplished. The preliminary count was published in real-time
as the tallying reports were being processed. Although these results were not
official, public opinion knew in less than 24 hours what the voting trends per
party were, with 79% of the voting records processed. A hundred percent of the records were made available online 36 hours later. Quite a feat considering
previous elections.
Although some politicians tried to belittle the work of the TSE
and the companies that processed the data (especially after an incident was
reported with the preferred votes in San Salvador and La Libertad), these
results are auditable. And most importantly, the official results shown a month
after the vote fully matched the preliminary count.
One additional benefit of the incorporation of technology to
process preliminary count, was that once the unofficial results were made
public, the TSE was able to begin their official count without much political
pressure. Knowing what the voting trends were calmed the waters and allowed
authorities to finish aggregating tallying reports.
Unlike what transpired in 2015, authorities, political parties,
the media and citizens were able to follow the preliminary count on a public
website. It was precisely this level of transparency and auditability what allowed
people to detect the inconsistencies found in the departments of San Salvador
and La Libertad. Parties and citizens were able to compare the digitized voting
records against the results being published.
Although the election observation missions from the European
Union (EU) and the Organization of American States (OAS) acknowledged the complexity of El Salvador’s voting system, they praised the efforts made by TSE with the
addition of technology. The modernization of all the processes to generate
preliminary results, helped the country to overcome the issues of 2015.
These 2018
elections, held in the most densely populated country in the Americas, are a
clear demonstration that implementing technology in the vote count -one of the
most crucial phases of any election-, makes the overall process faster and more
transparent. Results were available on Election Night and were
audited in real time.
