Argentina sees a new opportunity to modernize their voting

The recent victory of Argentinian president Mauricio Macri in the October legislative elections has given him the political capital to pursue old aspirations, such as an electoral reform that includes e-voting.

The very night the results were made public, Macri announced he would call all the sectors in the country to carry out legal changes of long political, economic and institutional reach.

This interest shown by the president can represent additional momentum, at least in electoral matters, since irregularities were reported during the closing of the election, an evidence of the country’s urgent need for a real modernization of its system.

For instance, in this article published by Leandro Querido, a political scientist specializing in electoral observation, some of these irregularities, faults and shortcomings are described in detail: vote counts made on blackboards, ballot theft, irregular marking of some ballots, certified electoral returns that were handwritten, and irregularities in the delivery of these statements to the tallying centres.

On the other hand, six provinces used biometric ID technology (fingerprint recognition), and this prevented old vices like double voting or identity theft from resurfacing, thus improving transparency in general.

Facing both realities, Argentina suffered in October from shortcomings that are typical to manual voting, but also experienced the benefits of technology, which could favour future debates on the reform.

As to this change in the legislation, it is worth mentioning that the country spent several months in 2016 discussing an amendment, whose axis was the progressive adoption of the Single Electronic Ballot (BUE), but this bill died in the senate.

Newspaper La Nación had an editorial on the topic, stating that, although the government did not generate a proper media climate that urged lawmakers to act, the Senate was also unwilling to discard the “ballot manipulation” allowed by manual voting.

Despite this, and with Macri’s political success, it is taken for granted that this new attempt to embrace e-voting will be successful, and that it will be a real improvement for the country.

In the last bill, together with the clause on gradual adoption of technology, it was mandatory for the country to adopt a Single Electronic Ballot (BUE), i.e. the model employed in Salta, Santa Fe and Buenos Aires. The BUE has had a mixed performance; it has worked relatively well in some elections but it has always raised doubts on its capacity so safely reflect the electorate’s will.

These two aspects must be debated. Even though international standards warn about the need to implement voting automation progressively, Argentina has been at the process of adoption for several years already, which makes it contradictory to delay it any further.

As far as the model to be employed, the country will have time to gauge the different types of e-voting variants available in the market, such as those that automate all stages, unlike the BUE, which only automates ballot printing and vote scanning.

E-vote for citizens abroad gains traction in Spain

Voting for expatriates tends to be a controversial issue in many countries, not only because the laws of several nations curtail the exercise of this political right, but also because the logistic required to let foreign nationals vote often hinders the process.

To turn this around, Spain is looking for solutions, and e-voting is considered as one of the tools to surpass the limitations faced by expatriates.

Early this year, Catalonians complained about the lack of legislation regulating political participation for expatriates, and about the absence of a technological mechanism to solve the difficulties of organizing elections outside the national territory.

More recently, the Central Electoral Board has spoken about the need to rescue the political rights of Spaniards residing abroad by means of e-voting.

The president of the board, Carlos Granados, has proposed the adoption of an automated model to solve the difficulties Spaniards who reside abroad face in order to vote. This was mentioned to the commission in charge of studying voting reform.

For Granados, although the so called voto rogado – i.e. ”pleaded vote”, where the voter must previously communicate their will to vote to an institution that may grant or refuse their request – is indeed constitutional, its application has meant delays and procedures which have reduced turnout. Granados states that they are looking for legal changes that allow the use of electoral technology as an alternative to conventional voting mechanisms like postal voting or voting in consulates, which should be kept nonetheless, but with “improvements”.

These statements join the recurrent claims from voters abroad, who usually face technical and logistical hurdles that curtail their democratic rights.  Some of these include the reception of wrong electoral materials at the diplomatic missions or the remote location of polling centres, usually consulates or embassies.  They also face difficulties to register and validate their condition as voters, primarily due to the request by some nations to have legal residency, or the fear of disclosing their migratory status.

Facing this reality, Spain finds itself in a good position to open the doors to change.  With it, they would make the political participation of all their citizens more viable, but this would also pave the road to select the safest and most effective voting model for all the republic.

Venezuela sees unfair voting practices and manipulation once more

The decadence of the electoral institutions in Venezuela has placed the whole system in check; a system that since 2004 had been a synonym for exactness. There had never been a single inconsistency between the printed election returns and the digital counts of the machines.  Until 2017.

The last two elections carried out in the country (National Constituent Assembly in July, and governors in October) have been negative landmarks; both events have seen unfair voting practices and manipulation abound.

In the case of the Constituent Assembly, we wrote that the process broke with the electoral dynamic that had been built in the country since 2004, the year they automated their elections, since the forms adopted by the National Electoral Council (CNE) were questioned by experts and politicians both in the country and abroad. Meanwhile, Smartmatic, the company that provided Venezuela with voting technology for 14 years, denounced that the CNE presented results different from those the system had tallied.

Now, in the recent governor elections of October 15th, an avalanche of irregularities took place to benefit a single political sector.  The Venezuelan Electoral Observatory (OEV) not only stated that the CNE “acted for the benefit of the Government’s political interests, which legitimizes the doubts certain sectors of the population have about the announced results”, but also kept an inventory of the anomalies detected before and during the election.

Some of these events previous to the election include the following: the date of the elections was decided illegally and arbitrarily, 42 political parties were declared illegal, it took a over a month after the elections were announced to publish a final date for the event and its electoral schedule, 33 activities were eliminated from said schedule, 17 activities regarding the election were carried out before it had even been officially announced, no substitutions were allowed for the candidates who dropped out, the voter registry was modified outside legal time limits, the CNE eliminated 76 polling centres and 7 thousand stations without previous notice, and less than a week before the vote it relocated 274 polling centres, affecting some 700 thousand voters.

All these irregularities have been studied by analysts in the country, who point that the CNE’s work and the government’s actions were aimed to grant advantages and “manipulate” the process to guarantee a government victory. Voices abroad support this thesis; for instance the Lima Group, made up of 12 countries, denounced irregularities, intimidation and manipulation, and demanded an audit of the vote.

The peak of these accusations has been the delay with which the CNE presented results in Bolivar state, and the results it made public.  Three days after the vote, it declared the government candidate the winner, with a margin of barely 2 thousand votes. This would not be a problem in itself, except the results showed (for the first time in the nation since they automated their vote) numerical inconsistencies in polling stations, as election returns were manually fed into the system instead of the automated tallies – a proof of tampering by the CNE. Smartmatic made it clear that they did not supply any products or services for this event.

Following the accusation of opposition candidate Andrés Velázquez, in total, the CNE added 2,066 votes for the government candidate in 11 polling stations (all of which were manually tampered with): just enough votes so he could “win” the election. Velázquez states that “11 voting machines did not transmit their results (which was unexplained), and their counts were manually loaded, and changed”.  This situation is perfectly summarized in a post by journalist Luis Carlos Díaz (Spanish).

An example of this practice happened at the Caroní Elementary School, where according to the CNE’s website, Justo Noguera (proclaimed as governor) allegedly received 502 votes. The election return for machine N3 in this centre shows he only got 138, thus showing an unexplained difference of 364 votes.

All these facts led the National Assembly to declare the election as fraudulent, and demand “the execution of an integral audit, qualitative and quantitative, of the whole process by international organisms and independent experts”.  However, the CNE considered that October 15 saw one of “the best voting events the country has ever had”.

Reviewing what happened during the votes for the Constituent Assembly and for governors, it is evident that Venezuela has resorted to abuses and illegal acts to do away with an automated voting model that protects the will of the voters, is based on cutting-edge technology and has witnesses for every stage of the process.

The cost of these actions has already generated internal and external mistrust of the CNE and the results it presents, but their impact will be even more evident in future elections, both in terms of turnout and the stances taken by political parties.

After the damage done, it is up to the efforts of authorities, political agents and voters to see the country has clean elections again, stopping electoral tampering before and after the event.