In one way or another, we have verified the truth of that popular saying that time goes by and you don't notice it. It is the background of the old Gardelian tango “Volver” from 1935, which says that “20 years is nothing”. And it's true! Even if 20 is nothing, imagine 10!
In 2004, when Jorge Rodriguez and SmartMatic put into operation the huge electronic electoral system we have now, for the Recall Referendum of Hugo Chavez Frias, Venezuelans naively believed that we could win in good faith against this new system. And the blow was so hard that, still dazed, we thought we could prove the masterfully executed trap, that the parties willingly accepted that they had lost. And then, 20 years later, they still believe it even though we have shown them that it was not so, with detailed statistical and technical reports in hand.
Some few technicians began to put the magnifying glass on that technological invention and still the bulk of the electoral population of Venezuela, and the most incredible thing, the opposition to the regime, continue to accept the use of that system of counting votes that the regime has been applying for 20 years, election after election, without complaining...
And again, 20 years later, we find ourselves in front of a super-complex technological system to count votes that would only require that each participant in the electoral act knows how to add up in each table of the country. They did it and keep it that complicated, precisely to hide the necessary traps to remain in power.
But again we were beaten by time. It was very difficult, if not impossible, 20 years ago to talk about electoral fraud. The media locked their doors because it was, according to them, a way to “encourage abstention”. Even the opposition parties and their leadership did not take it seriously as they did back then. This meant that nobody could be aware of it if the opposition did not make it public or at least fight against it.
When in 2006 a group of technicians gathered in an electoral NGO called ESDATA attempted the sacrilege of questioning the automated electoral system created by the regime, and warned the politicians who managed the command of the then candidate Manuel Rosales, the trap that was prepared for them, they were labeled “crazy academics who do not know about politics”, as I recounted in detail in my note in tribute to Eric Ekvall 10 years ago (see in Spanish Farewell Eric, in https://ticsddhh.blogspot.com/2013/11/farewell-eric.html).
It has been 20 years since the recall, and now things are very different. Today, with the deepening of online communication, we can all make an explanatory video and post it on social networks, write and broadcast electronically warning everyone directly how the regime has perverted the Venezuelan electoral system in a way that people can understand. It is surprising that some now consider this issue as a “novelty” because they did not even learn that Chávez's 2004 recall referendum was stolen from us, simply because the official opposition accepted the ruling of a corrupt CNE.
The counting of votes in an election has always been based on how to get the result of a polling station to a centralized counting center, no matter how far from the center it was. In the Venezuela of the first elections, the tally sheets from the polling stations arrived at the centralized tallying center using whatever means were available. There, each tally sheet from each table was processed, adding them one by one until the total result was reached, and the results were communicated to the public through cuts by time period to see the tendency of the result.
It was only until 1973 that the then Supreme Electoral Council (CSE) had a brand new IBM 360 Model 30 computer to compute the tally of the Protocols that arrived at the electoral institution, and they still estimated to count all the votes in 48 hours [1]. As time went by, machines were added to the different electoral processes, which registered the votes of the voters at the table itself, added them up and then sent the Minutes electronically through the CANTV lines, prior to the counting process of each vote by the witnesses of the parties at all the tables at the closing of the process.
Basically, the conceptual scheme of taking the tally sheets to a center for their totalization has not changed in spite of the speed of technological change, when all citizens can communicate with anyone, anywhere, in any part of the world. Why can't a tally sheet be communicated to everyone in the same way? If the technology for that already exists, then why not use it for the benefit of transparency?
And in spite of that, “the best electoral system in the world” invented by Jorge Rodriguez and SmartMatic 20 years ago, is still a huge black box full of extremely expensive technology, where we know the result of the elections in the early hours of the next day. At least in 1973, the CSE gave the Venezuelans the famous “boletines de corte” because technologically they could not do anything else to calm the Venezuelans' craving for information, because the Actas were still in an airport or in a truck of the Plan República, somewhere in Venezuela, and as the Actas arrived at the CSE, the boletines were coming out. That was respect for the will of the voter. But technology is here to stay, the problem is how to use it in a transparent way for the benefit of all.
In my modest technical opinion, with the current level of technology prevailing in the world, a center for the totalization would only exist to endorse the official results and not to sequester the information because there already exists in the hands of each one the sufficient computation capacity to add up the Protocols. And if a strictly manual election is carried out, with vote counting at the end of the process in each polling station, what would be required would be a cellular application in each polling station, certified by the electoral body, with sufficient security controls, to send the tallied Minutes with the electronic signature of the witnesses to the center of the body, and from there the latter would publish in real time in its web site each Minutes that is transcribed in any part of the country.
Complex encryption systems would not be required because the guarantors of this information would be the same people who signed the Minutes and publicly certified with their names and parties, at the same voting table, the veracity of the information that would be available for everyone to see. This Act could be downloaded by every citizen, organization, media of the country and the world, to be added in a format that could be easily processed by the citizens. The CNE could even place a giant screen in Plaza Caracas with the minute by minute results of the election, as it happened in the election of the President Elect of Panama José Raúl Mulino, where the results were recorded in a web page that was updated every second (see in Spanish Electoral Tribunal Election Results 2024 Panama, in https://resultados.te.gob.pa/resultados/100?s=03).
In this way, any person can do the “tracking” of each polling station as they close, and all of them added together would inform us of the situation of the polling stations, parishes, municipalities and States of the country. A voter could denounce if for any reason the results of a table do not correspond to those he/she witnessed during the scrutiny.
As it will be seen, this scheme of the past where a parapet of millions of dollars is mounted with expensive security systems to send the tally sheets to a computer center to be processed, is no longer necessary with the current level of technology. The voting machines would disappear from the voting centers and the billion dollar assembly of computers in the CNE beyond the ordinary processing of electoral information. Where would the greatest weight be? In the organization and distribution of the voting tables and voters' notebooks for each center.
The day of a thorough review of Venezuela's automated electoral system and the application of the ruling of the legitimate TSJ of June 13, 2018 is not far away (see ruling in Legitimate TSJ Declares the Use of Automated Voting for Elections in Venezuela Null and Void, at http://ticsddhh.blogspot.com/2018/06/tribunal-supremo-de-justicia-declara.html). The above is nothing more than the dream of a technician of a past generation that has not lost the sense of the present reality for the Venezuela of the future, where it will have to be much more efficient with much less money, without sacrificing security, reliability and above all transparency, fundamental pillars of free, fair and verifiable elections, after 20 years of electoral ignominy....
Caracas, May 9, 2024
Blog:
TIC’s & Derechos Humanos, https://ticsddhh.blogspot.com/
Email: luismanuel.aguana@gmail.com
Twitter:@laguana
[1] El
Destino del País en manos de la Computación. Revista Resumen, 9 de Diciembre de
1973, Vol. I.
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