A clarification at the beginning: the title of this article is not intended, as many wrong-thinking people might conclude, to insult the intelligence of the former presidential candidate of the opposition in 2006 and current Governor of the State of Zulia. Nothing could be further from my intention, although sometimes the statements of politicians, related to matters they do not know, could lead to that conclusion. It reminded me of the time when Ramón Guillermo Aveledo, the then Coordinator of the MUD in 2013, tried to explain to Venezuelans that it was an unimportant thing for the informatics criminals of the CNE-PSUV to do whatever they pleased with the electoral machines (see in Spanish De BIOS, Máquinas y Delincuentes, in https://ticsddhh.blogspot.com/2013/04/de-bios-maquinas-y-delincuentes.html).
In this opportunity, Manuel Rosales, 10 years later and following the example that Aveledo gave, now tries to convince us that "In the time of artificial intelligence, the most logical thing is not to do an election under a tree or counting the votes manually. The most logical thing to do is to do it with an automated and modern system" (see in Spanish Versión Final, Rosales tirotea las primarias, in https://versionfinal.com.ve/politica-dinero/rosales-tirotea-las-primarias-es-ilogico-realizar-un-proceso-debajo-de-un-arbol/).
I do not believe that any technical explanation I give in this brief space will convince this character, or any other that has concluded in that same superficiality of Rosales, that what the Governor of Zulia stated expresses, to say the least, an ignorance that we could qualify as culpable, which points to an open or covert intention to hide the electoral crimes that the regime has committed since Jorge Rodriguez introduced the automation of the electoral processes in Venezuela for the Recall Referendum of Hugo Chavez Frias in 2004.
But ignorance is not a crime, nor is calling someone ignorant an insult. My father, always an educator, repeated ad nauseam that ignorant is he who is ignorant, and what he desperately needs is education, because if he does not have it, he is subject to manipulation by others. Remember the Liberator: "An ignorant people is the blind instrument of its own destruction". And I do not doubt that Rosales is a case of ignorance, but when I say that it is culpable, I am trying to mean that an unfounded statement made by someone who occupies relevant positions in politics and power, hurts the population when he pretends to convince people of something he does not know, and his political position gives him a loudspeaker with the capacity to deceive people.
It is precisely in times of Artificial Intelligence when the unhealthy intentions of people -or criminals- must be put under greater observation and even more so when what is at stake is the exercise of power. The self-interested change in Venezuela of the manual vote counting system into an automated one, made the difference by the automatic manipulation of the electoral results, preventing the true will of the people to be manifested in all elections since 2004.
By allowing by law that the "electronic scrutiny" be carried out by a machine, as it has been carried out in Venezuela since 2004, a very dangerous Pandora's Box was opened, which cut off the right of the witnesses to "scrutinize" if the votes actually corresponded to the will of the voter, attesting to its true validity from the origin of the data. The regime changed the manual scrutiny into an automated one, transforming this scrutiny into an "audit" of only a percentage of the votes. A greater crime against the will of the people is impossible. And the first trial in an open election was precisely with Manuel Rosales in 2006, who was the first to accept those results.
The fundamental difference here is that an "electronic vote" is a piece of data that has not been scrutinized by a human being and enters the system without transparency. On the other hand, if machines are used as an auxiliary for the accounting and not to scrutinize what a human being decided, that vote scrutinized by a human being with all the guarantees, is then transformed into a data that enters an automated electoral system. From the point of view of transparency there is an abysmal difference between both schemes.
Being in the electronic domain without being scrutinized by a human being, the "electronic vote", which is at its core the will of the people, can be transformed, twisted, mutated to the interests of any power factor through programming tools. No matter who says otherwise, any computer program can be altered to produce the desired results.
It is for this reason that these truths as big as a temple were recognized by the ruling of the Constitutional Court in Germany on March 3, 2009, which prohibited the use of computers to conduct elections in that country: "108... The democratic legitimization of the election requires the ability to control the electoral process, in order to exclude or correct manipulations and refute unjustified suspicions. Only this makes possible the confidence based on the due order of the conformation of the representative body. The obligation of the legislature and the executive to ensure that the electoral process complies with the Constitution and is carried out properly is not enough, by itself, to convey the necessary legitimacy. Only if the voting public can convince itself of the legality of the act of transfer, i.e. that the election takes place "in the eyes of the public" (cf. Schreiber, Handbuch des Wahlrechts zum Deutschen Bundestag, 7. Ed. 2002, § 31 Rn. 2), the sovereign's confidence in the occupation of parliament in accordance with the will of the elector, which is necessary for the functioning of democracy and the democratic legitimacy of state decisions, can be guaranteed" (emphasis added) (see German Constitutional Court, Judgment 2 BVC 3/07 - 2 BVC 4/07 - Unconstitutionality of the E-Vote, in https://tinyurl.com/2st6t7mc). After this decision, Rosales should ask the Germans if they are manually counting votes under a tree…
Elections "in the eyes of the public", is the fundamental principle that guides the manual election. That then those results, once confirmed by the witnesses, in all the tables in manual scrutiny, go through the automated systems for their totalization is a completely different thing. The manual election is nothing more than the guarantee that we, the voters, demand to have a scrutiny "in the eyes of the public" that guarantees that our will was respected in its entirety and not a percentage of it, as it happens in the elections in Venezuela, which allows those who control the machines to automatically change the results.
Manual elections do not mean elections without computers, even though ignorance says that they will be held under a tree counting votes manually. The human and not artificial intelligence of Venezuelans indicates that this must be the way to truly authentic elections, not only for opposition primaries, but for any election of popularly elected officials after leaving tyranny. That will in no way be at odds with the world's advances in information technology, in spite of the "artificial intelligence" of those who out of ignorance (or who knows if complicity) still do not know that they are self-servingly used as useful fools by a tyranny...
Caracas, August 10, 2023
Blog:
TIC’s & Derechos Humanos, https://ticsddhh.blogspot.com/
Email: luismanuel.aguana@gmail.com
Twitter:@laguana
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