On August 2nd,
2017, Smartmatic, the company in charge of election automation in
Venezuela, denounced that the nation’s National Electoral Council (CNE, by its
acronym in Spanish) gave different results than those shown by the system.
Since then, there have been two more elections and a third one is scheduled,
where the nation’s president, 2,436 councilors and 233 members of regional legislative
councils are to be elected.
During the
elections for the
National Constituent Assembly on July 30th, 2017, the president
of the CNE received a voter turnout figure, and simply announced another. Simple as that. That is how the Venezuelan
government manipulated election results.
The software in the machines was not hacked, and neither were the
transmission process or the counting.
The tallying system gave a number, the government announced theirs. The opposition had decided to abstain from
these elections, so there were no witnesses in the tallying centres.
Venezuelan
elections have been under a microscope for years. Both government and
opposition had won and lost using the same voting system, and there had never
been a physical, printed voting record that failed to match the electronic ones
published on the electoral body’s website.
The accusations by losing candidates never prospered. Before, audits prior to the voting always showed
the system did what it was supposed to, and audits following the voting
confirmed the results to be exact.
Everything
changed in the October 2017 Regional Elections and the Municipal Elections
later that same year. During
the former, 11 printed voting records failed to match the digital records
published online by the CNE. These
11 records were manually entered into the tallying system. When a voting
machine cannot transmit due to technical or connectivity issues, the voting
records are entered manually into the system.
Then, what does it mean when it is the manually loaded records that do
not match? It means that tampering the automated system is impossible, and that
every vote entered is counted exactly as it was cast. In the Municipal
Elections, some states had more votes than voters, with totals that adding up
to more than 100% of the votes.
For these
upcoming Presidential Elections in May 2018, there was an “Agreement over Electoral Guarantees” signed by representatives of a few political
parties and the National Electoral Council.
This agreement
contemplates 11 alleged electoral guarantees. However, most of these are
elements already present in the Venezuelan law governing elections. There are two of them regarding the voting
process: one, to undo the relocation of polling centres that took place in
2017, and two, to carry out all the technical audits that had been taking place
until the Parliamentary Elections.
As of today,
having audits does not guarantee that results will not be tampered with, as it
happened in Bolivar state, or that candidates will be allowed to have witnesses
in the tallying rooms at the CNE to make sure the results announced match the
records in the system.
In
the 2012 and 2015 elections, the CNE carried out between 12 and 15 audits in a
period of 55 days. For the elections
this May, the CNE hopes to perform 14 audits (an additional two) in a mere 31
days.
The absence of
Smartmatic as a technology provider, the accusations of tampering of the vote
turnout for the National Consitutent Assembly, and the manual alteration of the
results in Bolivar state cast a shadow over the performance of the automated
voting system. This, on a much different level than before, where the main
issue were the unfair advantages the government gave itself, not electronic
fraud.
